Abstract
What one takes as one’s ultimate end does not merely affect matters of belief: it also affects one’s choice of more immediate ends and of the means by which such ends are to be pursued. In fact it affects the whole direction of one’s life. My concern in this chapter will be with what I shall call proximate ends and means: that is, both with the undesirable consequences, on other aspects of their behaviour, of the fact that the ultimate end of the Utopians is pleasure, and also with other ends, logically but not necessarily, dependent on Utopian premises, which More can be taken to have regarded as to some extent undesirable.
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Notes
J. H. Hexter, More’s Utopia: The Biography of an Idea (1952), p. 70.
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© 1985 Peter New
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New, P. (1985). Utopia: Proximate Ends and Means. In: Fiction and Purpose in Utopia, Rasselas, The Mill on the Floss and Women in Love. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-07704-5_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-07704-5_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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