D. Applying the Principle of Utility (Utilitarianism, ch. II)
Despite any difficulties, the Principle of Utility still is a better guide to moral action than any other principle. For most people most of the time, taking account of everyone’s interests in making a decision seldom involves large numbers of people. Regarding any time problem in arriving at decisions, he argues that human beings have sufficient past experience to establish rules, based upon the Principle of Utility, that serve as guides for actions without out having to make decisions anew all of the time. Thus, for example, we can establish on Utilitarian grounds the rule that stealing is wrong and can then follow this rule rather than having to determine the precise pleasure and pain for all persons involved whenever an occasion for stealing arises.
Regarding for instance Mill’s position on lying, in Utilitarianism Mill records, “ . . . . It would often be expedient for the purpose of getting over momentary embarrassment or attaining some object immediately useful to ourselves or others, to tell a lie. But inasmuch as the cultivation in ourselves of a sensitive feeling on the subject of veracity, is one of the most useful and the enfeeblement of that feeling one of the most hurtful, things to which our conduct can be instrumental; and inasmuch as any, even unintentional deviation from truth does that much toward weakening the trustworthiness of human assertion, which is not only the principle support of all present social well being, but the insufficiency of which does more than any one thing that can be named to keep back civilization, virtue, everything on which human happiness on the largest scale depends; we feel that the violation for a present advantage of a rule of such transcendent expediency is not expedient and that he who for the sake of a convenience to himself or to some other individual does what depends on him to deprive mankind of the good, and inflict upon them the evil, involved in the greater or less reliance which they can place in each other’s word, acts the part of one of their worst enemies. Yet that even this rule, sacred as it is, admits of possible exceptions, is acknowledged by all moralists; the chief of which is when the withholding of some fact (as of information from a malefactor, or of bad news from a person dangerously ill) would save an individual (especially an individual other than oneself) from great and unmerited evil, and when the withholding can only be effected by denial. But in order that the exception may not extend beyond the need, and may have the least possible effect in weakening the reliance on veracity, it ought to be recognized, and, if possible, its limits defined; and if the principle of utility is good for anything, it must be good for weighting these conflicting utilities against one another, and marking out the region within which one or the other preponderates.” Rules may require improvement with further experience, however.
