Henry Sidgwick, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
The utilitarian is committed to whatever conduct actually produces the greatest happiness — no more, but no less.1 Now it is a plain question of fact whether the general happiness is best served by everyone's reasoning directly on utilitarian grounds, or by most people's adhering firmly to the received rules while the standard itself is reserved to those few whose judgment and circumstances fit them to apply it.2
And it may turn out — I do not say it always does — that the consequences are best when the utilitarian basis of a rule is not generally professed, because the profession of it would weaken the rule's hold on those who keep it best by keeping it without question. If that is so, then the utilitarian conclusion is that one may rightly do, and privately justify, what it would be wrong to advocate openly; and that the doctrine of this exception should itself be kept esoteric.3
I record this because it follows from the principle, and I will not suppress a consequence merely because it is uncomfortable. It is not a licence for the powerful to please themselves; it is a strict question of what actually maximizes the good, and the burden of showing that concealment does so is heavy and rarely discharged. But the utilitarian who refuses even to consider it has stopped being a utilitarian at the first inconvenient result.4
Still, for all practical purposes, he does accept " greatest happi- " ^ " ness as (to use his own words) a }tlain as well as true standard for whatever is right or wrong, useful, useless, or mischievous in human conduct, whether in the field of morals or of " politics." The primary function, then, of the utilitarian moralist is to apply this standard to the particulars of human lite, so as to determine by it the…Miscellaneous Essays and Addresses, pp. 165–166
We are supposed to see that general happiness will be enhanced (just as the excellence of a metrical composition is) by a slight admixture of irregularity along with a general observance of received rules; and hence to justify the irregular conduct of a few individuals, on the ground that the supply of regular conduct from other members of the community may reasonably be expected to be adequate.The Methods of Ethics
These conclusions are all of a paradoxical character: there is no doubt that the moral consciousness of a plain man broadly repudiates the general notion of an esoteric morality, differing from that popularly taught; and it would be commonly agreed that an action which would be bad if done openly is not rendered good by secrecy.The Methods of Ethics
Especially as all the objections to innovation, noticed in the previous section, apply with increased force if the innovator does not even claim to be introducing a new and better general rule.The Methods of Ethics
One of the most notorious passages in the Methods and the target of Bernard Williams's influential coinage "Government House utilitarianism" — the charge (in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, 1985) that Sidgwick's view divides the moral world into a colonial elite who know the real principles and a native population fed edifying rules, and that this offends against the transparency a decent morality requires. Rawls built a publicity condition into justice as fairness partly against this. On the other side, Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek and Peter Singer ("Secrecy in Consequentialism", 2010; The Point of View of the Universe, 2014) defend the Sidgwickian position as a coherent and sometimes correct implication of consequentialism honestly followed. The passage is the sharpest test of whether indirect utilitarianism can answer the objection from integrity and publicity.