well who have deserved equally well of it, that is, who have deserved
equally well absolutely. This is the highest abstract standard of social
and distributive justice; towards which all institutions, and the
efforts of all virtuous citizens, should be made in the utmost possible
degree to converge. But this great moral duty rests upon a still deeper
foundation, being a direct emanation from the first principle of morals,
and not a mere logical corollary from secondary or derivative doctrines.
It is involved in the very meaning of Utility, or the
Greatest-Happiness Principle. That principle is a mere form of words
without rational signification, unless one person's happiness, supposed
equal in degree (with the proper allowance made for kind), is counted
for exactly as much as another's. Those conditions being supplied,
Bentham's dictum, 'everybody to count for one, nobody for more than
one,' might be written under the principle of utility as an explanatory
commentary.[D] The equal claim of everybody to happiness in the
estimation of the moralist and the legislator, involves an equal claim
to all the means of happiness, except in so far as the inevitable
conditions of human life, and the general interest, in which that of
every individual is included, set limits to the maxim; and those limits
ought to be strictly construed. As every other maxim of justice, so
this, is by no means applied or held applicable universally; on the
contrary, as I have already remarked, it bends to every person's ideas
of social expediency. But in whatever case it is deemed applicable at
all, it is held to be the dictate of justice. All persons are deemed to
have a _right_ to equality of treatment, except when some recognised
social expediency requires the reverse. And hence all social
inequalities which have ceased to be considered expedient, assume the
character not of simple inexpediency, but of injustice, and appear so
tyrannical, that people are apt to wonder how they ever could have been
tolerated; forgetful that they themselves perhaps tolerate other