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Page 13
JUSTICE
The benevolent propensities are thus inherent in the human mind.
We are impelled to seek the happiness of others. We experience
a satisfaction in being the authors of that happiness. Everything
that lives is open to impressions or pleasure and pain. We are
led by our benevolent propensities to regard every human being
indifferently with whom we come in contact. They have preference
only with respect to those who offer themselves most obviously
to our notice. Human beings are indiscriminating and blind; they
will avoid inflicting pain, though that pain should be attended
with eventual benefit; they will seek to confer pleasure without
calculating the mischief that may result. They benefit one at the
expense of many.
There is a sentiment in the human mind that regulates benevolence
in its application as a principle of action. This is the sense of
justice. Justice, as well as benevolence, is an elementary law of
human nature. It is through this principle that men are impelled
to distribute any means of pleasure which benevolence may suggest
the communication of to others, in equal portions among an equal
number of applicants. If ten men are shipwrecked on a desert island,
they distribute whatever subsistence may remain to them, into equal
portions among themselves. If six of them conspire to deprive the
remaining four of their share, their conduct is termed unjust.
The existence of pain has been shown to be a circumstance which the
human mind regards with dissatisfaction, and of which it desires
the cessation. It is equally according to its nature to desire that
the advantages to be enjoyed by a limited number of persons should
be enjoyed equally by all. This proposition is supported by the
evidence of indisputable facts. Tell some ungarbled tale of a number
of persons being made the victims of the enjoyments of one, and he
who would appeal in favour of any system which might produce such
an evil to the primary emotions of our nature, would have nothing
to reply. Let two persons, equally strangers, make application for
some benefit in the possession of a third to bestow, and to which
he feels that they have an equal claim. They are both sensitive
beings; pleasure and pain affect them alike.
CHAPTER II
It is foreign to the general scope of this little treatise to encumber
a simple argument by controverting any of the trite objections of
habit or fanaticism. But there are two; the first, the basis of all
political mistake, and the second, the prolific cause and effect
of religious error, which it seems useful to refute.
First, it is inquired, 'Wherefore should a man be benevolent and
just?' The answer has been given in the preceding chapter.
If a man persists to inquire why he ought to promote the happiness
of mankind, he demands a mathematical or metaphysical reason for
a moral action. The absurdity of this scepticism is more apparent,
but not less real than the exacting a moral reason for a mathematical
or metaphysical fact. If any person should refuse to admit that all
the radii of a circle are of equal length, or that human actions
are necessarily determined by motives, until it could be proved that
these radii and these actions uniformly tended to the production of
the greatest general good, who would not wonder at the unreasonable
and capricious association of his ideas?
The writer of a philosophical treatise may, I imagine, at this
advanced era of human intellect, be held excused from entering into
a controversy with those reasoners, if such there are, who would
claim an exemption from its decrees in favour of any one among those
diversified systems of obscure opinion respecting morals, which,
under the name of religions, have in various ages and countries
prevailed among mankind. Besides that if, as these reasoners have
pretended, eternal torture or happiness will ensue as the consequence
of certain actions, we should be no nearer the possession of a
standard to determine what actions were right and wrong, even if this
pretended revelation, which is by no means the case, had furnished
us with a complete catalogue of them. The character of actions as
virtuous or vicious would by no means be determined alone by the
personal advantage or disadvantage of each moral agent individually
considered. Indeed, an action is often virtuous in proportion to
the greatness of the personal calamity which the author willingly
draws upon himself by daring to perform it. It is because an
action produces an overbalance of pleasure or pain to the greatest
number of sentient beings, and not merely because its consequences
are beneficial or injurious to the author of that action, that it
is good or evil. Nay, this latter consideration has a tendency to
pollute the purity of virtue, inasmuch as it consists in the motive
rather than in the consequences of an action. A person who should
labour for the happiness of mankind lest he should be tormented
eternally in Hell, would, with reference to that motive, possess as
little claim to the epithet of virtuous, as he who should torture,
imprison, and burn them alive, a more usual and natural consequence
of such principles, for the sake of the enjoyments of Heaven.
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