the fitness of the agent to be an
efficient member of the social structure to which he belongs. In
particular cases this may lead to such problems as that of Fletcher of
Saltoun. His sense of honour and his general benevolence, though both
useful, might come into collision; and the most difficult of all
questions of casuistry arise from such conflicts between private and
public affections. Mill is justified in holding that a sense of honour
cannot give an ultimate and autocratic decision. Under some pretext or
other, we shall have to ask the Utilitarian question whether on the
whole it may not be causing more misery than the virtuous action is
worth. But that only means that the character must be so balanced as
to give due weight to each motive; not that we can abstract from
character altogether, as though human beings could be mere colourless
and uniform atoms, embodying abstract formulae.

Mill is following Bentham, and only brings out more clearly the
psychological assumptions. A man, he says, acts from the 'same motive'
whether he steals five shillings or earns it by a day's labour. The
motive, in this sense, regards only one consequence, whereas the
'intention' regards all. The 'motive,' that is, is only one of the
motives or a part of the character, and this way of speaking is one of
the awkward results of turning 'motives' into 'things.' The obvious
answer is that which Mill himself makes to Mackintosh. Mackintosh and
Butler, he thinks, personify particular 'appetites.'[603] It is not
really the 'conscience' which decides, but the man. That is quite
true, and similarly it is the whole man who steals or works, not the
'personified' motive; and it is accordingly from the whole character
that we judge. We have to consider the relation of the love of five
shillings to the other qualities of industry and honesty. The same
view appears in Mill's characteristic dislike of 'sentimentalism.'
Wishing to attack Mackintosh's rhetoric about the delight of virtuous
feeling, he for once quotes a novel to illustrate this point. When
Parson Adams defined charity as a 'generous disposition to relieve the
distressed,' Peter Pounce approved; 'it is, as you say, a disposition,
and does not so much consist in the act as in the disposition to do
it.'[604] When, therefore, Mackintosh says that he finds it difficult
to separate the virtue from the act, Mill replies that nothing is
easier. The virtue is 'in the act and its consequences';