1821. April 26.

Constit. Cod. First Lines

(2.)

Constitutional

Finance

5

1. Moral aptitude

to confess or disposition

to promote greatest happiness

Moral inaptitude, or

disposition to promote

personal and thus

particular happiness

at the expense of

general.

1. As to appropriate moral aptitude. If, in the breast

of the individual in question, instead of appropriate aptitude in this

shape, the opposite inaptitude have place be found, [be the degree of appropriate

intellectual aptitude and active talent ever so great,] the result will be so it is that,

by any extraordinary degree of appropriate intellectual aptitude and

appropriate active talent, the aggregate quantity of appropriate aptitude,

so far from being augmented, will be diminished. Appropriate

moral aptitude consists, on this occasion, in the disposition to promote,

to the utmost, the greatest happiness of the greatest number: the inaptitude,

correspondent and opposite to this branch of appropriate aptitude,

is the disposition to promote the particular interest happiness of the

individual in question and his particular connections, at the

expence, and by the sacrifice, of a portion, to any amount larger,

of that other and more extensive interest and happiness. [But, the greater

the degree of appropriate intellectual aptitude and correspondent

active talent the individual possesses, the greater is the degree of

facility he will possess with respect to the carrying into effect

that disposition of his which, by the supposition, has place: viz.

the disposition to make sacrifice of the greatest good

of the greatest number to his own private interests according to the

conception that happens to be entertained by him in relation to

it.

The higher a man's place is in the scale of external felicity,

the lower, not the higher, will naturally, not to say necessarily,

be his place in the scale of appropriate moral aptitude as here

explained.

1. Sympathy