lar individual, then the happiness of that individual.

The interest of the community is one of the most general expressions
that can occur in the phraseology of morals: no wonder that the meaning
of it is often lost. When it has a meaning, it is this: The community
is a fictitious _body_, composed of the individual persons who are
considered as constituting, as it were, its _members_. The interest of
the community, then, is what? The sum of the interests of the several
members who compose it.

It is vain to talk of the interest of the community, without
understanding what is the interest of the individual. A thing is said to
promote the interest, or to be _for_ the interest, of an individual,
when it tends to add to the sum total of his pleasures: or, what comes
to the same thing, to diminish the sum total of his pains.

An action, then, may be said to be conformable to the principle of
utility, or for shortness' sake to utility (meaning with respect to the
community at large), when the tendency it has to augment the happiness
of the community is greater than any it has to diminish it.

A measure of government (which is but a particular kind of action,
performed by a particular person or persons) may be said to be
conformable to or dictated by the principle of utility, when in like
manner the tendency which it has to augment the happiness of the
community is greater than any which it has to diminish it.

When an action, or in particular a measure of government, is supposed by
a man to be conformable to the principle of utility, it may be
convenient for the purposes of discourse to imagine a kind of law or
dictate called a law or dictate of utility, and to speak of the action
in question as being conformable to such law or dictate.

A man may be said to be a partisan of the principle of utility, when the
approbation or disapprobation he annexes to any action, or to any
measure, is determined by and proportioned to the tendency which he
conceives it to have to augment or to diminish the happiness of the
community; or in other words, to its conformity or unconformity to the
laws or dictates of utility.

Of an action that is conformable to the principle of utility, one may
always say either that it is one that ought to be done, or at least that
it is not one that ought not to be done. One may say also that it is
right it should be done, at least that it is not wrong it should be
done; that it is a right action, at l