The objection that the criterion of consequences is difficult of application, and thus devoid of practical utility, he rebuts by asserting that the difficulty is not greater than in other cases.  We have simply to follow effects as far as we can; and it is by its ascertainable, not by its unascertainable, consequences, that we pronounce an action, as we pronounce an article of food or a statute, to be good or bad.  The main effects of most actions are already very well ascertained, and the consequences to human happiness, when unascertainable, are of no value.  If the test were honestly applied, ethical discrepancies would tend gradually to disappear.

He starts another objection:—­The happiness-test is good as far as it goes, but we also approve and disapprove of actions as they are just or generous, or the contrary, and with no reference to happiness or unhappiness.  In answering this argument, he confines himself to the case of Justice.  To be morally approved, a just action must in itself be peculiarly pleasant or agreeable, irrespective of its other effects, which are left out:  for on no theory can pleasantness or agreeableness be dissociated from moral approbation.  Now, as Happiness is but a general appellation for all the agreeable affections of our nature, and unable to exist except in the shape of some agreeable emotion or combinations of agreeable emotions; the just action that is morally commendable, as giving naturally and directly a peculiar kind of pleasure independent of any other consequences, only produces one species of those pleasant states of mind that are ranged under the genus happiness.  The test of justice therefore coincides with the happiness-test.  But he does not mean that we are actually affected thus, in doing just actions, nor refuse to accept justice as a criterion of actions; only in the one case he maintains that, whatever association may have effected, the just act must originally have been approved for the sake of its consequences, and, in the other, that justice is a criterion, because proved over and over again to be a most beneficial principle.

After remarking that the Moral Sentiments of praise and blame may enter into accidental connection with, other feelings of a distinct character, like pity, wonder, &c., he criticises the use of the word Utility in Morals.  He avoids the term as objectionable, because the useful in common language does not mean what is directly productive of happiness, but only what is instrumental in its production, and in most cases customarily or recurrently instrumental.  A blanket is of continual utility to a poor wretch through a severe winter, but the benevolent act of the donor is not termed useful, because it confers the benefit and ceases.  Utility is too narrow to comprehend all the actions that deserve approbation.  We want an uncompounded substantive expressing the two attributes of conferring and conducing to happiness; as a descriptive phrase, producing