It may be gathered from some of our quotations from Vico that he sometimes tended to conceive men as conscious of their own utilitarian ends but unconscious of moral ends. This would logically lead to explaining social life on exclusively utilitarian principles, and to considering morality as an accident relatively to the human will and therefore not really moral: an external accretion more or less capable of holding mankind together, or the obscure work of a supramundane providence. This utilitarianism especially creeps into a passage where he says that man, on account of his corrupt nature, being under the tyranny of self-love which compels him to make private utility his chief guide and to want every useful thing for himself and nothing for his fellow, unable to hold his passions in check so as to direct them by justice, in the state of nature desires only his own safety; after taking a wife and begetting children, desires his safety and the safety of his family; after attaining civil life, desires his own safety together with the safety of his city; after extending his rule over other peoples, he desires the safety of the nation; after joining with other nations in wars, treaties, alliances and commerce, he desires his safety and that of all mankind: and "in all these circumstances he principally desires his own interest." For this reason "it can be nothing else than divine providence that binds him down within such ordinances as to maintain by justice the society of the family, the state and ultimately of mankind; by which ordinances since man cannot attain what he wants, at least he wants to attain as much utility as is permitted: and this is what is called justice." The public virtue of Rome, he writes elsewhere, "was nothing but a good use made by providence of grave, unsightly and cruel private faults, that states might be preserved at a time when human minds, being in a state of extreme particularity, could not naturally understand a common good."
Utilitarianism was however, as we know, strongly repugnant to Vico's observed ethics, founded as the latter is upon the moral consciousness or shame; and hence these statements, which unconsciously tend in that direction, can only be explained as resulting from the disturbance sometimes produced in his mind by the lingering remains of the transcendent or theological conception of providence, and also from the confused character of his thought, which prevented him from keeping the idea of individual illusions clearly distinguished from that of individual aims; so that he sometimes substituted the second when he ought to have been dealing solely with the first. If the provident deity is "the unity of the spirit which informs and animates the world of nations," these do not fail to obtain their particular ends in order that it may move on to its universal ones, but both alike are realised in them: and man is at every moment both utilitarian and moral, or at least supposes himself to be moral when he is utilitarian or utilitarian when he is really moral.