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It has been concluded in my book Philosophy of Life with Self-organization that self-reproduction is the suffi- cient and necessary condition of the origin of life, so the essence of life is breeding. And therefore the purpose of human life is concluded: the purpose of human life is to survive, breed and meet needs of themselves, which is the final source of all values and significance.5 According to John S. Mill, the principle of utility is, “Actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness.” “pleasure, and freedom from pain, are the only things desirable as ends.”6 The happiness, according to Jeremy Bentham, include not only happiness of sense and wealth, but also amity, benevolence and skill, etc.7 These are similar to Maslow's love and self-actulization.8 Bentham pointed out profoundly that “common sense”, “rule of right”, “law of nature”, etc, are all reducible to the principle of utility, asceticism is only a misuse of the principle of utility.9 David Hume proved that morality cannot originate from reason, reason ought to be the slave of sensibility.10 The super-ego, which Sigmund Freud mentioned, is the slave of id, too.
Jacques P. Thiroux distinguished egoism with utili- tarianism. Universal ethical egoism states as its basic principle that everyone should always act in his own self-interest regardless of the interests of others unless their interests also serve his. Utilitarianism try to figure out which act would bring about the greatest amount of good consequences not just for himself or herself, but for everyone involved in the situation. Both egoism and utilitarianism are consequentialism. One of the reasons, which Jacques P. Thiroux and some other philosophers opposed consequentialism, is that benefit is difficult to assess.11 It is difficult indeed, especially when different benefits of a person or of different people are contradictory. But we have to assess no matter how difficult it is, and in fact, everyone is calculating his benefit every day. For example, we always calculate gains and losses again and again when we go shopping, marry, or look for a work. Companies always forecast before investment, governments always assess the result before practise a policy or sign a treaty. There are usually mistakes among these assessments, but people are always learning from mistakes.