inequalities under an equally mistaken notion of expediency, the
correction of which would make that which they approve seem quite as
monstrous as what they have at last learnt to condemn. The entire
history of social improvement has been a series of transitions, by which
one custom or institution after another, from being a supposed primary
necessity of social existence, has passed into the rank of an
universally stigmatized injustice and tyranny. So it has been with the
distinctions of slaves and freemen, nobles and serfs, patricians and
plebeians; and so it will be, and in part already is, with the
aristocracies of colour, race, and sex.

It appears from what has been said, that justice is a name for certain
moral requirements, which, regarded collectively, stand higher in the
scale of social utility, and are therefore of more paramount obligation,
than any others; though particular cases may occur in which some other
social duty is so important, as to overrule any one of the general
maxims of justice. Thus, to save a life, it may not only be allowable,
but a duty, to steal, or take by force, the necessary food or medicine,
or to kidnap, and compel to officiate, the only qualified medical
practitioner. In such cases, as we do not call anything justice which is
not a virtue, we usually say, not that justice must give way to some
other moral principle, but that what is just in ordinary cases is, by
reason of that other principle, not just in the particular case. By this
useful accommodation of language, the character of indefeasibility
attributed to justice is kept up, and we are saved from the necessity of
maintaining that there can be laudable injustice.

The considerations which have now been adduced resolve, I conceive, the
only real difficulty in the utilitarian theory of morals. It has always
been evident that all cases of justice are also cases of expediency: the