Thought ultimately has to be given

Thought ultimately has to be given to the question of when it is morally legitimate to lie, suppress the truth, and so forth (questions which again may not have the definitive answers we would hope for), and to the distinction between valuing truth and valuing truth-telling. The latter two are obviously related and valuing truth presumably leads to valuing truth-telling to some extent. But there is a distinction between valuing truth in the sense of thinking it important that we get things right and approving of people telling the truth to one another. We might mark this distinction by referring to the former as the value of truth in inquiry, the latter as the value of truth in social intercourse. One might, for example, insist that scientists proceed honestly and arrive at true conclusions, without assuming that they should also give a true account of these conclusions to the world (if, for example, they are researching potentially lethal germs). But for the moment it is enough to say that a premium on truth is built into the very idea of morality.
The fifth principle to be introduced has already been mentioned: it is a principle relating to people’s well-being. As I said in Chapter 2 above, it is not easy to find the most suitable name for this principle (happiness, benevolence, felicity, goodwill, non-malevolence, non-suffering), and to some extent these different labels may pick out subtly different concepts. A principle of ‘benevolence’ and a principle of ‘goodwill’ may just be two names for the same thing, or they may have slightly different connotations; and certainly there is a difference, however slight, between positive formulations such as ‘benevolence’ and the negative formulation ‘non-malevolence’, just as there is a difference between promoting happiness and diminishing suffering. As with the previous four principles, since the claim is that morality necessarily involves reference to them but at a very high level, such that it would be a mistake to understand them in terms of a set of specific rules, so here we need a general non-question-begging term, and that is a reason for opting for ‘well-being’. Though it is not ideal, it seems more open and general than, say, happiness. And while some might want to argue that morality does not necessarily have anything to do with happiness, at least if that word implies conscious satisfaction and gratification of desires, I do not see how anyone could argue that a moral theory need not have any reference to people’s well-being in any sense.
There is room for argument about what precisely the parameters of well-being may be, what induces it, both generally and in particular cases, and whether or when it should override other moral considerations. But the point here is to establish that a society that had a code of conduct that made no reference to people’s well-being, even implicitly, would not have anything recognizable as a moral code. In the first place, it is hard to make sense of the notion that a claim such as that one ought to keep promises or ought not to steal could be made without presuming that to some extent in some way it was to the advantage of people to abide by these rules. ‘One ought not to steal, I know; but it’s a great shame, because we’d all be so much better off if we didn’t have this rule’ seems distinctly odd. Of course, as already conceded, there are complex and difficult questions to be answered about what does make people ‘better off’ or ‘advantage’ them, but that doesn’t alter the fact that anything that is going to count as a moral code has to be presumed to be to the advantage of people, individually, collectively, or both, in some way or another. Part of the point of moral behaviour (and we should remember here that we are divorcing morality from religion and are therefore not thinking in terms of doing as we are told for the sake of salvation) is to regulate conduct according to certain standards or norms, but the regulation has to be to some purpose, and surely it is our well-being that is our ultimate concern, considering ourselves as social animals.