There are cases where the specific consequences of an action are so momentous as to overbear the rule; for example, resistance to a bad government, which the author calls an anomalous question, to be tried not by the rule, but by a direct resort to the ultimate or presiding-principle, and by a separate calculation of good and evil.  Such was the political emergency of the Commonwealth, and the American revolution.  It would have been well, the author thinks, if utility had been the sole guide in both cases.

There is a second objection to Utility, more perplexing to deal with.  How can we know fully and correctly all the consequences of actions?  The answer is that Ethics, as a science of observation and induction, has been formed, through a long succession of ages, by many and separate contributions from many and separate discoverers.  Like all other sciences, it is progressive, although unfortunately, subject to special drawbacks.  The men that have enquired, or affected to enquire, into Ethics, have rarely been impartial; they have laboured under prejudices or sinister interests; and have been the advocates of foregone conclusions.  There is not on this subject a concurrence or agreement of numerous and impartial enquirers.  Indeed, many of the legal and moral rules of the most civilized communities arose in the infancy of the human mind, partly from caprices of the fancy (nearly omnipotent with barbarians), and partly from an imperfect apprehension of general utility, the result of a narrow experience.  Thus the diffusion and the advancement of ethical truth encounter great and peculiar obstacles, only to be removed by a better general education extended to the mass of the people.  It is desirable that the community should be indoctrinated with sound views of property, and with the dependence of wealth, upon the true principle of population, discovered by Malthus, all which they are competent to understand.

The author refers to Paley’s Moral Philosophy as an example of the perverting tendency of narrow and domineering interests in the domain of ethics.  With many commendable points, there is, in that work, much ignoble truckling to the dominant and influential few, and a deal of shabby sophistry in defending abuses that the few were interested in upholding.

As a farther answer to the second objection, he remarks, that it applies to every theory of ethics that supposes our duties to be set by the Deity.  Christianity itself is defective, considered as a system of rules for tho guidance of human conduct.

He then turns to the alternative of a Moral Sense.  This involves two assumptions.

First, Certain sentiments, or feelings of approbation or disapprobation, accompany our conceptions of certain human actions.  These feelings are neither the result of our reflection on the tendencies of actions, nor the result of education; the sentiments would follow the conception, although we had neither adverted to the good or evil tendency of the actions, nor become aware of the opinions of others regarding them.  This theory denies that the sentiments known to exist can be produced by education.  We approve and disapprove of actions we know not why.