right, it is among the highest achievements of virtue and morality to sacrifice your own in order to secure another's happiness, and the disinterestedness, and therefore the virtue, is surely the greater, rather than less, if you sacrifice more happiness of your own than you secure to another. So much follows necessarily from what has been said, and something more besides. It follows further that Utilitarianism is not less in error in declaring that actions calculated to diminish the total sum of happiness must necessarily be wrong, cannot possibly be allowable, still less meritorious, than it had previously been shown to be in declaring that actions calculated to augment the sum total of happiness must necessarily be meritorious. There is but one way in which Utilitarianism can even temporarily rebut the charge of fallacy, of which otherwise it must here stand convicted, and that is by renouncing all claim to be a new system of ethics, and not pretending to be more than a new system of nomenclature. And even so, it could not help contradicting, and thereby refuting itself. That nothing is right but what is of preponderating utility; that whatever is of preponderating utility is right; these are propositions perfectly intelligible, indeed, but which will be found to be tenable only on condition that the very same things may be both right and wrong. The confusion, thrice confounded, inseparable from the substitution of such novel definitions for those which had previously been universally in vogue, is but the smaller of two evils which must thence arise. It would be bad enough that the word 'right' could not be used without raising doubt whether what people had previously understood by the 'just' or the 'generous,' or only the 'expedient' were meant; but a still worse consequence would be that, even if no doubt of the sort were entertained, and if all men were agreed to take the word in none but its utilitarian sense, the landmarks of right and wrong would thereby be well nigh obliterated. Due credit has already been given to Utilitarianism for its exemplary zeal in inculcating the practice of virtue, but its merit in that respect is more than neutralised by its equally zealous inculcation of principles, according to which it is impossible to decide beforehand whether any particular practice will be virtuous or not.