Moreover, they spoke much of pleasure and happiness, and hardly
at all of misery and pain: whereas it would have been wiser, and truer to
their real inspiration, to have laid all the emphasis on evils to be
abated, leaving the good to shape itself in freedom. Suffering is the
instant and obvious sign of some outrage done to human nature; without
this natural recoil, actual or imminent, no morality would have any
sanction, and no precept could be imperative. What silliness to command me
to pursue pleasure or to avoid it, if in any case everything would be
well! Save for some shadow of dire repentance looming in the distance, I
am deeply free to walk as I will. The choice of pleasure for a principle
of morals was particularly unfortunate in the British utilitarians; it
lent them an air of frivolity absurdly contrary to their true character.
Pleasure might have been a fit enough word in the mouth of Aristippus, a
semi-oriental untouched by the least sense of responsibility, or even on
the lips of humanists in the eighteenth century, who, however sordid their
lives may sometimes have been, could still move in imagination to the
music of Mozart, in the landscape of Watteau or of Fragonard. But in the
land and age of Dickens the moral ideal was not so much pleasure as
kindness: this tenderer word not only expresses better the motive at work,
but it points to the distressing presence of misery in the world, to make
natural kindness laborious and earnest, and turn it into a legislative
system.
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