FALSE IDEAS OF UTILITY.
False ideas of utility entertained by legislators are one source of
errors and injustice. It is a false idea of utility which thinks more of
the inconvenience of individuals than of the general inconvenience; which
tyrannises over men’s feelings, instead of arousing them into action;
which says to Reason, ‘Be thou subject.’ It is a false idea of utility
which sacrifices a thousand real advantages for one imaginary or trifling
drawback; which would deprive men of the use of fire because it burns
or of water because it drowns; and whose only remedy for evils is the
entire destruction of their causes. Of such a kind are laws prohibiting
the wearing of arms, for they only disarm those who are not inclined nor
resolved to commit crimes, whilst those who have the courage to violate
the most sacred laws of humanity, the most important in the law-code,
are little likely to be induced to respect those lesser and purely
arbitrary laws, which are easier to contravene with impunity; and the
strict observance of which would imply the destruction of all personal
liberty, (that liberty dearest to the enlightened legislator and to men
generally,) subjecting the innocent to vexations which only the guilty
deserve. These laws, whilst they make still worse the position of the
assailed, improve that of their assailants; they increase rather than
diminish the number of homicides, owing to the greater confidence with
which an unarmed man may be attacked than an armed one. They are not so
much preventive of crimes as fearful of them, due as they are to the
excitement roused by particular facts, not to any reasoned consideration
of the advantages or disadvantages of a general decree. Again, it is
a false idea of utility, which would seek to impart to a multitude of
intelligent beings the same symmetry and order that brute and inanimate
matter admits of; which neglects present motives, the only constantly
powerful influences with the generality of men, to give force to remote
and future ones, the impression of which is very brief and feeble,
unless a force of imagination beyond what is usual makes up, by its
magnifying power, for the object’s remoteness. Lastly, it is a false idea
of utility, which, sacrificing the thing to the name, distinguishes the
public good from that of every individual member of the public. There is
this difference between the state of society and the state of nature,
that in the latter a savage only commits injuries against others with a
view to benefit himself, whilst in the former state men are sometimes
moved by bad laws to injure others without any corresponding benefit
to themselves. The tyrant casts fear and dread into the minds of his
slaves, but they return by repercussion with all the greater force to
torment his own breast. The more confined fear is in its range, so much
the less dangerous is it to him who makes it the instrument of his
happiness; but the more public it is and the larger the number of people
it agitates, so much the more likely is it that there will be some rash,
some desperate, or some clever and bold man who will try to make use of
others for his own purpose, by raising in them hopes, that are all the
more pleasant and seductive as the risk incurred in them is spread over
a greater number, and as the value attached by the wretched to their
existence diminishes in proportion to their misery. This is the reason
why offences ever give rise to fresh ones: that hatred is a feeling much
more durable than love, inasmuch as it derives its force from the very
cause that weakens the latter, namely, from the continuance of the acts
that produce it.