[36] In earlier editions of the Inquiry Hume expressly included all approved qualities under the general notion of “virtue.” In later editions he avoided this strain on usage by substituting or adding “merit” in several passages—allowing that some of the laudable qualities which he mentions would be more commonly called “talents,” but still maintaining that “there is little distinction made in our internal estimation” of “virtues” and “talents.”
[37] It is to be observed that whereas Price and Stewart (after Butler) identify the object of self-love with happiness or pleasure, Reid conceives this “good” more vaguely as including perfection and happiness; though he sometimes uses “good” and happiness as convertible terms, and seems practically to have the latter in view in all that he says of self-love.
[38] E.g. Reid proposes to apply this principle in favour of monogamy, arguing from the proportion of males and females born; without explaining why, if the intention of nature hence inferred excludes occasional polygamy, it does not also exclude occasional celibacy.
[39] We may observe that some recent writers, who would generally be included in this school, avoid in various ways the difficulty of constructing a code of external conduct. Sometimes they consider moral intuition as determining the comparative excellence of conflicting motives (James Martineau), or the comparative quality of pleasures chosen (Laurie), which seems to be the same view in a hedonistic garb; others hold that what is intuitively perceived is the rightness or wrongness of individual acts—a view which obviously renders ethical reasoning practically superfluous.
[40] The originality—such as it is—of Paley’s system (as of Bentham’s) lies in its method of working out details rather than in its principles of construction. Paley expressly acknowledges his obligations to the original and suggestive, though diffuse and whimsical, work of Abraham Tucker (Light of Nature Pursued, 1768-1774). In this treatise, as in Paley’s, we find “every man’s own satisfaction, the spring that actuates all his motives,” connected with “general good, the root whereout all our rules of conduct and sentiments of honour are to branch,” by means of natural theology demonstrating the “unniggardly goodness of the author of nature.” Tucker is also careful to explain that satisfaction or pleasure is “one and the same in kind, however much it may vary in degree, ... whether a man is pleased with hearing music, seeing prospects, tasting dainties, performing laudable actions, or making agreeable reflections,” and again that by “general good” he means “quantity of happiness,” to which “every pleasure that we do to our neighbour is an addition.” There is, however, in Tucker’s theological link between private and general happiness a peculiar ingenuity which Paley’s common sense has avoided. He argues that men having no free will have really no desert; therefore the divine equity must ultimately distribute happiness in equal shares to all; therefore I must ultimately increase my own happiness most by conduct that adds most to the general fund which Providence administers.
But in fact the outline of Paley’s utilitarianism is to be found a generation earlier—in Gay’s dissertation prefixed to Law’s edition of King’s Origin of Evil—as the following extracts will show:—“The idea of virtue is the conformity to a rule of life, directing the actions of all rational creatures with respect to each other’s happiness; to which every one is always obliged.... Obligation is the necessity of doing or omitting something in order to be happy.... Full and complete obligation which will extend to all cases can only be that arising from the authority of God.... The will of God [so far as it directs behaviour to others] is the immediate rule or criterion of virtue ... but it is evident from the nature of God that he could have no other design in creating mankind than their happiness; and therefore he wills their happiness; therefore that my behaviour so far as it may be a means to the happiness of mankind should be such; so this happiness of mankind may be said to be the criterion of virtue once removed.”
The same dissertation also contains the germ of Hartley’s system, as we shall presently notice.
[41] It must be allowed that Paley’s application of this argument is somewhat loosely reasoned, and does not sufficiently distinguish the consequence of a single act of beneficent manslaughter from the consequences of a general permission to commit such acts.
[42] This list gives twelve out of the fourteen classes in which Bentham arranges the springs of action, omitting the religious sanction (mentioned afterwards), and the pleasures and pains of self-interest, which include all the other classes except sympathy and antipathy.
[43] In the Deontology published by Bowring from MSS. left after Bentham’s death, the coincidence is asserted to be complete.