Indeed, an action is often virtuous in proportion to
the greatness of the personal calamity which the author willingly
draws upon himself by daring to perform it. It is because an
action produces an overbalance of pleasure or pain to the greatest
number of sentient beings, and not merely because its consequences
are beneficial or injurious to the author of that action, that it
is good or evil. Nay, this latter consideration has a tendency to
pollute the purity of virtue, inasmuch as it consists in the motive
rather than in the consequences of an action. A person who should
labour for the happiness of mankind lest he should be tormented
eternally in Hell, would, with reference to that motive, possess as
little claim to the epithet of virtuous, as he who should torture,
imprison, and burn them alive, a more usual and natural consequence
of such principles, for the sake of the enjoyments of Heaven.
My neighbour, presuming on his strength, may direct me to perform
or to refrain from a particular action; indicating a certain arbitrary
penalty in the event of disobedience within power to inflict.
My action, if modified by his menaces, can no degree participate
in virtue. He has afforded me no criterion as to what is right or
wrong. A king, or an assembly of men, may publish a proclamation
affixing any penalty to any particular action, but that is not
immoral because such penalty is affixed. Nothing is more evident
than that the epithet of virtue is inapplicable to the refraining
from that action on account of the evil arbitrarily attached to it.
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