But if utilitarian conduct is not a political duty, it may seem evident that it is at least a moral duty. Now a moral duty is said by Bentham[38] to be "created by a kind of motive which, from the _un_certainty of the _persons_ to apply it, and of the _species_ and _degree_ in which it will be applied, has hardly yet got the name of punishment: by various mortifications resulting from the ill-will of persons _un_certain and variable,--the community in general; that is, such individuals of that community as he whose duty is in question shall happen to be connected with." In plain language, then, moral duty simply means the ill-will of a man's neighbours which follows his conduct in so far as that conduct affects them disagreeably. Such ill-will on the part of a man's neighbours may result from success or from failure on his part, from a breach of etiquette, from refusal to sacrifice to the caprice of those neighbours the wider good of the society whom his conduct affects (but to whom it may be unknown), from deception or from telling the truth. In a word, the duty--that is, the punishment--is entirely uncertain: not only as regards the persons applying it, its nature and its amount, but also as regards the kind of actions to which it applies. They will be actions unpleasant to the people who inflict the punishment, but not necessarily hurtful to the common weal: since the immediate effects of an action are easily recognised, while its wider and more lasting consequences are neither so apparent nor appeal so surely to the interest of those who are cognisant of the action and immediately affected by it. Moral duty, therefore, as Bentham defines it, depending on, or rather identical with, the ill-will of one's neighbours, is indefinite and limited in its nature, and can command or sanction no such definite and wide-reaching rule for conduct as that a man should always act for the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people whom his action may affect. Utilitarian conduct, therefore, is neither a political duty nor a moral duty; nor does Bentham follow Paley in insisting upon it as a religious duty "created by punishment; by punishment expected at the hands of a person _certain_--the Supreme Being." And "if he persists in asserting it to be a duty--but without meaning it to be understood that it is on any one of these three accounts that he looks upon it as such--all he then asserts is his own internal _sentiment_; all he means then is that he feels himself _pleased_ or _displeased_ at the thoughts of the point of conduct in question, but without being able to tell _why_. In this case he should e'en say so; and not seek to give an undue influence to his own single suffrage, by delivering it in terms that purport to declare the voice either of God, or of the law, or of the people."[39] [Sidenote: (_d_) nor sufficiently motived in private ethics,] [Sidenote: which can be reduced to prudence.]