3. If use and harm are the measures of morality, all differ-
ence between mere harm and injury disappears ; and balanced
minds are not ready to accept this view of things. Injury
adds wilfulness and malice to mere harm, which oftener than
not is wholly without the stigma of moral blame. The pedes-
trian, who tramples your watch to pieces on the dark street,
works you a lot of harm, but no injury. The enemy, who
deliberately and knowingly smashes the same with an axe,
over and above the harm he works, does you a downright in-
jury. In both cases the harm is practically the same; while
injury is absent from one case, present to the other. Even
if all men without a single exception were allowed to repeat
the act of the innocent pedestrian, it could never become
morally wrong, in spite of the harm consequent on its occur-
rence. And yet the harm done would prove as much a hard-
ship to the watch's owner as the injury done him by his
enemy. The effects of the harm and the injury are the same,
the moral difference between the two is due to the agent's
purpose, motive, intention.
4. Plato in his Republic confutes a theory of morals, that
would seem to coincide in all respects with Utilitarianism.
Briefly, it stands for the contention that a man's highest good
in this life is his own personal indulgence, at the expense
of his neighbors. Society, to keep down fighting and save
the race from suicide, hampers this inclination, and blocks
each individual citizen's aspirations for his own highest
good. It forces him to forego the natural right he has to
prosecute his own happiness, at the expense of his neighbors.
