CHAPTER 5
Ends which a Law May Have in View
Ends which a Law May Have in View
As to the general and ultimate end, this upon the principle of utility can be no other than the greatest good of the whole community. But the good of the community is the sum of the several particular goods (if the term may be employed) of the several individuals of which it is composed: so that to augment the good of any one such individual is pro tanto to augment the good of the whole community. A law therefore of which the immediate end is no other than the good or benefit of the person whose law it is does not on that account cease to be such a law as is capable of being warranted by the principle of utility: much less does it cease to be entitled to the appellation of a law. Now by end is here meant not the eventual end, which is a matter of chance, but the intended end, which is a matter of design....
It is to be remembered that law may belong to the sovereign either in the way of conception or in the way of adoption: in the latter case there are necessarily two persons whose law in these two different senses it may be said to be. These two persons it may happen may in regard to the parts they have necessarily taken in the establishment of the law, have been actuated by two different motives: they may have had in view two different ends.
As to the sovereign, the end or external motive he can have had in view in adopting the law, can upon the principle of utility, have been no other than the greatest good of the community: which end we suppose his measures to be directed to of course: since it is only in as far as that is the case that these enquiries are calculated or designed to be of any use to him. But with regard to the party to whom the law appertains in the way of conception and from whom it immediately ensues, the case is different. In many instances it may happen, and that properly enough, that the end which he has in view is no other than his own particular benefit or satisfaction: . . . in this case are all the mandates for instance of the master acting as such, as also those of the parent and of the husband in as far as the parent and the husband are allowed to act in the capacity of a master. . . .
But the more conspicuous case and the more common with such mandates as in consideration of their generality and their permancy are usually distinguished by the name of laws is that in which the proper end of the sovereign who adopts, and that of the subordinate magistrate who issues the mandate, coincide: being each of them not the particular good of the author of the mandate but the general good of the community at large. . . .
Where in then consists the good of the community? A question this which is to be answered not by vague declamation, not by point and metaphor, but by minute analysis and sober estimation ....
Those who cry out against pleasure,. as such, know not what it is they say. They swerve manifestly from the principle of utility .
For matter of censure or approbation I appeal solely to this principle. The principle such as it is, is not of my own invention. The merit of discovering it is none of mine. The legitimate consequences of it, should any of them prove obnoxious are not chargeable upon me. I had it from Epicurus, from Carneades, from Horace, from Helvetius, from Beccaria. All that remains for me is only to apply it to particular cases as they come under review.
The learned Grotius ... bethinks himself of the line of Horace, in which the heathen poet, adopting . . . the doctrine of the Greek philosopher Carneades, expressly places the whole fabric of moral science on the foundation of this principle. "Utility" says that philosopher in the figurative language given him by his poetical commentator, "is the mother of justice and Equity." This genealogy Grotius positively objects to: whereupon he enters into an investigation which is not altogether of the clearest, but the result of which is that utility, though not the parent of natural Law, is however a distant relation to it, being first cousin to its Great-Grandmother.
After this he assures us that although no utility were to be looked for from the observance of the Law, it would be the part of a wise man, not of a fool to be led by it, as being prompted thereto by nature....
Our own Lord Coke in his Commentary on Littleton in the course of the Chapter on Fee Simple bethinks himself of giving a catalogue of the several principles or "fountains" from whence his Author (in whose works are the very sum and substance of the Law) may be observed to draw his arguments. There are twenty of them in all. In the tenth place after a variety of arguments of very different complexion, comes in the argumentum ab inconvenienti; and in the fifteenth place with a variety of arguments of a nature still more disparate, between them enters in the guise of a different sort of argument, the argument ab utili et inutili.. . .