But to secure us these does not secure us happiness.

It simply leaves us free to secure it, if we can, for ourselves.

Once let us have some common agreement as to what this happiness is, we may then be able to formulate other rules for attaining it.

But in the absence of any such agreement, the only possible aim of social morality, the only possible meaning of the _general good_, is not any kind or any kinds of happiness, but the security of those conditions without which all happiness would be impossible.
Suppose the human race were a set of canaries in a cage, and that we were in grave doubt as to what seed to give them--hemp-seed, rape-seed, or canary-seed, or all three mixed in certain proportions.

That would exactly represent the state of our case thus far.