otive from him who does
the same thing from duty or benevolence; the act itself is different.
The rescue of the man is, in the case supposed, only the necessary first
step of an act far more atrocious than leaving him to drown would have
been. Had Mr. Davis said, "The rightness or wrongness of saving a man
from drowning does depend very much"--not upon the motive, but--"upon
the _intention_" no utilitarian would have differed from him. Mr. Davis,
by an oversight too common not to be quite venial, has in this case
confounded the very different ideas of Motive and Intention. There is no
point which utilitarian thinkers (and Bentham pre-eminently) have taken
more pains to illustrate than this. The morality of the action depends
entirely upon the intention--that is, upon what the agent _wills to do_.
But the motive, that is, the feeling which makes him will so to do, when
it makes no difference in the act, makes none in the morality: though it
makes a great difference in our moral estimation of the agent,
especially if it indicates a good or a bad habitual _disposition_--a
bent of character from which useful, or from which hurtful actions are
likely to arise.]

CHAPTER III.

OF THE ULTIMATE SANCTION OF THE PRINCIPLE OF UTILITY.

The question is often asked, and properly so, in regard to any supposed
moral standard--What is its sanction? what are the motives to obey it?
or more specifically, what is the source of its obligation? whence does
it derive its binding force? It is a necessary part of moral philosophy
to provide the answer to this question; which, though frequently
assuming the shape of an objection to the utilitarian morality, as if it
had some special applicability to that above others, really arises in
regard to all standards. It arises, in fact, whenever a person is called
on to adopt a standard or refer morality to any basis on which he has
not been accustomed to rest it. For the customary morality, that which
education and opinion have consecrated, is the only one which presents
itself to the mind with the feeling of being _in itself_ obligatory; and
when a person is asked to believe that this morality _derives_ its
obligation from some general principle round which custom has not thrown
the same halo, the assertion is to him a paradox; the supposed
corollaries seem to have a more binding force than the original theorem;
the superstructure seems to stand better without, than with, what is
represent