according to our explanation of wrong, only be that which has been
produced by his own powers. Therefore by taking this we really take the
powers of his body from the will objectified in it, to make them subject
to the will objectified in another body. For only so does the wrong-doer,
by seizing, not the body of another, but a lifeless thing quite different
from it, break into the sphere of the assertion of will of another person,
because the powers, the work of this other body, are, as it were,
incorporated and identified with this thing. It follows from this that all
true, _i.e._, moral, right of property is based simply and solely on work,
as was pretty generally assumed before Kant, and is distinctly and
beautifully expressed in the oldest of all codes of law: “Wise men who
know the past explain that a cultured field is the property of him who cut
down the wood and cleared and ploughed it, as an antelope belongs to the
first hunter who mortally wounds it” (Laws of Manu, ix. 44). Kant’s
philosophy of law is an extraordinary concatenation of errors all leading
to each other, and he bases the right of property upon first occupation.
To me this is only explicable on the supposition that his powers were
failing through old age. For how should the mere avowal of my will to
exclude others from the use of a thing at once give me a _right_ to it?
Clearly such an avowal itself requires a foundation of right, instead of
being one, as Kant assumes. And how would he act unjustly _in se_, _i.e._,
morally, who does not respect that claim to the sole possession of a thing
which is based upon nothing but its own avowal? How should his conscience
trouble him about it? For it is so clear and easy to understand that there
can be absolutely no such thing as a just seizure of anything, but only a
just conversion or acquired possession of it, by spending our own original
powers upon it. When, by any foreign labour, however little, a thing has
been cultivated, improved, kept from harm or preserved, even if this
labour were only the plucking or picking up from the ground of fruit that
has grown wild; the person who forcibly seizes such a thing clearly
deprives the other of the result of his labour expended upon it, makes the
body of this other serve his will instead of its own, asserts his will
beyond its own phenomenon to the denial of that of the other, _i.e._, does
injustice or wrong.(74) On the other hand, the mere enjoyment of a thing,
without any cultivation or preservation of it from destruction, gives just
as little right to it as the mere avowal of our desire for its sole
possession. Therefore, though one family has hunted a district alone, even
for a hundred years, but has done nothing for its improvement; if a
stranger comes and desires to hunt there, it cannot prevent him from doing
so without moral injustice. Thus the so-called right of preoccupation,
according to which, for the mere past enjoyment of a thing, there is
demanded the further recompense of the exclusive right to its future
enjoyment, is morally entirely without foundation. A new-comer might with
far better right reply to him who was depending upon such a right, “Just
because you have so long enjoyed, it is right that others should now enjoy
also.” No moral right can be established to the sole possession of
anything upon which labour cannot be expended, either in improving it or
in preserving it from harm, unless it be through a voluntary surrender on
the part of others, as a reward for other services. This, however, already
presupposes a community regulated by agreement—the State. The morally
established right of property, as we have deduced it above, gives, from
its nature, to the owner of a thing, the same unlimited power over it
which he has over his own body; and hence it follows that he can part with
his possessions to others either in exchange or as a gift, and they then
possess them with the same moral right as he did.
As regards the doing of wrong generally, it occurs either through violence
or through craft; it matters not which as far as what is morally essential
is concerned. First, in the case of murder, it is a matter of indifference
whether I make use of a dagger or of poison; and the case of every bodily
injury is analogous. Other cases of wrong can all be reduced to the fact
that I, as the doer of wrong, compel another individual to serve my will
instead of his own, to act according to my will instead of according to
his own. On the path of violence I attain this end through physical
causality, but on the path of craft by means of motivation, _i.e._, by
means of causality through knowledge; for I present to his will illusive
motives, on account of which he follows my will, while he believes he is
following his own. Since the medium in which the motives lie is knowledge,
I can only accomplish this by falsifying his knowledge, and this is the
_lie_. The lie always aims at influencing another’s will, not merely his
knowledge, for itself and as such, but only as a means, so far as it
determines his will. For my lying itself, inasmuch as it proceeds from my
will, requires a motive; and only the will of another can be such a
motive, not his knowledge in and for itself; for as such it can never have
an influence upon _my_ will, therefore it can never move it, can never be
a motive of its aim. But only the willing and doing of another can be
this, and his knowledge indirectly through it. This holds good not only of
all lies that have manifestly sprung from self-interest, but also of those
which proceed from pure wickedness, which seeks enjoyment in the painful
consequences of the error into which it has led another. Indeed, mere
empty boasting aims at influencing the will and action of others more or
less, by increasing their respect or improving their opinion of the
boaster. The mere refusal of a truth, _i.e._, of an assertion generally,
is in itself no wrong, but every imposing of a lie is certainly a wrong.
He who refuses to show the strayed traveller the right road does him no
wrong, but he who directs him to a false road certainly does. It follows
from what has been said, that every _lie_, like every act of violence, is
as such _wrong_, because as such it has for its aim the extension of the
authority of my will to other individuals, and so the assertion of my will
through the denial of theirs, just as much as violence has. But the most
complete lie is the _broken contract_, because here all the conditions
mentioned are completely and distinctly present together. For when I enter
into a contract, the promised performance of the other individual is
directly and confessedly the motive for my reciprocal performance. The
promises were deliberately and formally exchanged. The fulfilment of the
declarations made is, it is assumed, in the power of each. If the other
breaks the covenant, he has deceived me, and by introducing merely
illusory motives into my knowledge, he has bent my will according to his
intention; he has extended the control of his will to another individual,
and thus has committed a distinct wrong. On this is founded the moral
lawfulness and validity of the _contract_.
Wrong through violence is not so _shameful_ to the doer of it as wrong
through craft; for the former arises from physical power, which under all
circumstances impresses mankind; while the latter, by the use of
subterfuge, betrays weakness, and lowers man at once as a physical and
moral being. This is further the case because lying and deception can only
succeed if he who employs them expresses at the same time horror and
contempt of them in order to win confidence, and his victory rests on the
fact that men credit him with honesty which he does not possess. The deep
horror which is always excited by cunning, faithlessness, and treachery
rests on the fact that good faith and honesty are the bond which
externally binds into a unity the will which has been broken up into the
multiplicity of individuals, and thereby limits the consequences of the
egoism which results from that dispersion. Faithlessness and treachery
break this outward bond asunder, and thus give boundless scope to the
consequences of egoism.
In the connection of our system we have found that the content of the
concept of _wrong_ is that quality of the conduct of an individual in
which he extends the assertion of the will appearing in his own body so
far that it becomes the denial of the will appearing in the bodies of
others. We have also laid down, by means of very general examples, the
limits at which the province of wrong begins; for we have at once defined
its gradations, from the highest degree to the lowest, by means of a few
leading conceptions. According to this, the concept of wrong is the
original and positive, and the concept of right, which is opposed to it,
is the derivative and negative; for we must keep to the concepts, and not
to the words. As a matter of fact, there would be no talk of right if
there were no such thing as wrong. The concept right contains merely the
negation of wrong, and every action is subsumed under it which does not
transgress the limit laid down above, _i.e._, is not a denial of the will
of another for the stronger assertion of our own. That limit, therefore,
divides, as regards a purely _moral_ definition, the whole province of
possible actions into such as are wrong or right. Whenever an action does
not encroach, in the way explained above, on the sphere of the assertion
of will of another, denying it, it is not wrong. Therefore, for example,
the refusal of help to another in great need, the quiet contemplation of
the death of another from starvation while we ourselves have more than
enough, is certainly cruel and fiendish, but it is not wrong; only it can
be affirmed with certainty that whoever is capable of carrying unkindness
and hardness to such a degree will certainly also commit every wrong
whenever his wishes demand it and no compulsion prevents it.
But the conception of right as the negation of wrong finds its principal
application, and no doubt its origin, in cases in which an attempted wrong
by violence is warded off. This warding off cannot itself be wrong, and
consequently is right, although the violence it requires, regarded in
itself and in isolation, would be wrong, and is here only justified by the
motive, _i.e._, becomes right. If an individual goes so far in the
assertion of his own will that he encroaches upon the assertion of will
which is essential to my person as such, and denies it, then my warding
off of that encroachment is only the denial of that denial, and thus from
my side is nothing more than the assertion of the will which essentially
and originally appears in my body, and is already implicitly expressed by
the mere appearance of this body; consequently is not wrong, but right.
That is to say: I have then a right to deny that denial of another with
the force necessary to overcome it, and it is easy to see that this may
extend to the killing of the other individual, whose encroachment as
external violence pressing upon me may be warded off by a somewhat
stronger counteraction, entirely without wrong, consequently with right.
For all that happens from my side lies always within the sphere of the
assertion of will essential to my person as such, and already expressed by
it (which is the scene of the conflict), and does not encroach on that of
the other, consequently is only negation of the negation, and thus
affirmation, not itself negation. Thus if the will of another denies my
will, as this appears in my body and the use of its powers for its
maintenance, without denial of any foreign will which observes a like
limitation, I can _without wrong_ compel it to desist from such denial,
_i.e._, I have so far a _right of compulsion_.
In all cases in which I have a right of compulsion, a complete right to
use _violence_ against another, I may, according to the circumstances,
just as well oppose the violence of the other with _craft_ without doing
any wrong, and accordingly I have an actual _right to lie precisely so far
as I have a right of compulsion_. Therefore a man acts with perfect right
who assures a highway robber who is searching him that he has nothing more
upon him; or, if a burglar has broken into his house by night, induces him
by a lie to enter a cellar and then locks him in. A man who has been
captured and carried off by robbers, for example by pirates, has the right
to kill them not only by violence but also by craft, in order to regain
his freedom. Thus, also, a promise is certainly not binding when it has
been extorted by direct bodily violence, because he who suffers such
compulsion may with full right free himself by killing, and, _a fortiori_,
by deceiving his oppressor. Whoever cannot recover through force the
property which has been stolen from him, commits no wrong if he can
accomplish it through craft. Indeed, if some one plays with me for money
he has stolen from me, I have the right to use false dice against him,
because all that I win from him already belongs to me. Whoever would deny
this must still more deny the justifiableness of stratagem in war, which
is just an acted lie, and is a proof of the saying of Queen Christina of
Sweden, “The words of men are to be esteemed as nothing; scarcely are
their deeds to be trusted.” So sharply does the limit of right border upon
that of wrong. For the rest, I regard it as superfluous to show that all
this completely agrees with what was said above about the unlawfulness of
the lie and of violence. It may also serve to explain the peculiar theory
of the lie told under pressure.(75)
In accordance with what has been said, wrong and right are merely moral
determinations, _i.e._, such as are valid with regard to the consideration
of human action as such, and in relation _to the inner significance of
this action in itself_. This asserts itself directly in consciousness
through the fact that the doing of wrong is accompanied by an inward pain,
which is the merely felt consciousness of the wrong-doer of the excessive
strength of the assertion of will in itself, which extends even to the
denial of the manifestation of the will of another, and also the
consciousness that although he is different from the person suffering
wrong as far as the manifestation is concerned, yet in himself he is
identical with him. The further explanation of this inner significance of
all pain of conscience cannot be given till later. He who suffers wrong
is, on the other hand, painfully conscious of the denial of his will, as
it is expressed through the body and its natural requirements, for the
satisfaction of which nature refers him to the powers of his body; and at
the same time he is conscious that without doing wrong he might ward off
that denial by every means unless he lacks the power. This purely moral
significance is the only one which right and wrong have for men as men,
not as members of the State, and which consequently remains even when man
is in a state of nature without any positive law. It constitutes the basis
and the content of all that has on this account been named _natural law_,
though it is better called moral law, for its validity does not extend to
suffering, to the external reality, but only to the action of man and the
self-knowledge of his individual will which grows up in him from his
action, and which is called _conscience_. It cannot, however, in a state
of nature, assert itself in all cases, and outwardly upon other
individuals, and prevent might from reigning instead of right. In a state
of nature it depends upon every one merely to see that in every case he
_does_ no wrong, but by no means to see that in every case he _suffers_ no
wrong, for this depends on the accident of his outward power. Therefore
the concepts right and wrong, even in a state of nature, are certainly
valid and by no means conventional, but there they are valid merely as
_moral_ concepts, for the self-knowledge of one’s own will in each. They
are a fixed point in the scale of the very different degrees of strength
with which the will to live asserts itself in human individuals, like the
freezing-point on the thermometer; the point at which the assertion of
one’s own will becomes the denial of the will of another, _i.e._,
specifies through wrong-doing the degree of its intensity, combined with
the degree in which knowledge is involved in the _principium
individuationis_ (which is the form of all knowledge that is subject to
the will). But whoever wants to set aside the purely moral consideration
of human action, or denies it, and wishes to regard conduct merely in its
outward effects and their consequences, may certainly, with Hobbes,
explain right and wrong as conventional definitions arbitrarily assumed,
and therefore not existing outside positive law, and we can never show him
through external experience what does not belong to such experience.
Hobbes himself characterises his completely empirical method of thought
very remarkably by the fact that in his book “_De Principiis Geometrarum_”
he denies all pure mathematics properly so called, and obstinately
maintains that the point has extension and the line has breadth, and we
can never show him a point without extension or a line without breadth.
Thus we can just as little impart to him the _a priori_ nature of
mathematics as the _a priori_ nature of right, because he shuts himself
out from all knowledge which is not empirical.
The pure doctrine of right is thus a chapter of ethics, and is directly
related only to _action_, not to _suffering_; for only the former is the
expression of will, and this alone is considered by ethics. Suffering is
mere occurrence. Ethics can only have regard to suffering indirectly,
merely to show that what takes place merely to avoid suffering wrong is
itself no infliction of wrong. The working out of this chapter of ethics
would contain the precise definition of the limits to which an individual
may go in the assertion of the will already objectified in his body
without denying the same will as it appears in another individual; and
also the actions which transgress these limits, which consequently are
wrong, and therefore in their turn may be warded off without wrong. Thus
our own _action_ always remains the point of view of the investigation.
But the _suffering of wrong_ appears as an event in outward experience,
and in it is manifested, as we have said, more distinctly than anywhere
else, the phenomenon of the conflict of the will to live with itself,
arising from the multiplicity of individuals and from egoism, both of
which are conditioned through the _principium individuationis_, which is
the form of the world as idea for the knowledge of the individual. We also
saw above that a very large part of the suffering essential to human life
has its perennial source in that conflict of individuals.
The reason, however, which is common to all these individuals, and which
enables them to know not merely the particular case, as the brutes do, but
also the whole abstractly in its connection, has also taught them to
discern the source of that suffering, and induced them to consider the
means of diminishing it, or, when possible, of suppressing it by a common
sacrifice, which is, however, more than counterbalanced by the common
advantage that proceeds from it. However agreeable it is to the egoism of
the individual to inflict wrong in particular cases, this has yet a
necessary correlative in the suffering of wrong of another individual, to
whom it is a great pain. And because the reason which surveys the whole
left the one-sided point of view of the individual to which it belongs,
and freed itself for the moment from its dependence upon it, it saw the
pleasure of an individual in inflicting wrong always outweighed by the
relatively greater pain of the other who suffered the wrong; and it found
further, that because here everything was left to chance, every one had to
fear that the pleasure of conveniently inflicting wrong would far more
rarely fall to his lot than the pain of enduring it. From this reason
recognised that both in order to diminish the suffering which is
everywhere disseminated, and as far as possible to divide it equally, the
best and only means was to spare all the pain of suffering wrong by
renouncing all the pleasure to be obtained by inflicting it. This means is
the _contract of the state_ or _law_. It is easily conceived, and little
by little carried out by the egoism, which, through the use of reason,
proceeds methodically and forsakes its one-sided point of view. This
origin of the state and of law I have indicated was already exhibited as
such by Plato in the “Republic.” In fact, it is the essential and only
origin, determined by the nature of the matter. Moreover, in no land can
the state have ever had a different origin, because it is just this mode
of originating this aim that makes it a state. But it is a matter of
indifference whether, in each particular nation, the condition which
preceded it was that of a horde of savages independent of each other
(anarchy), or that of a horde of slaves ruled at will by the stronger
(despotism). In both cases there existed as yet no state; it first arose
through that common agreement; and according as that agreement is more or
less free from anarchy or despotism, the state is more or less perfect.
Republics tend to anarchy, monarchies to despotism, and the mean of
constitutional monarchy, which was therefore devised, tends to government
by factions. In order to found a perfect state, we must begin by providing
beings whose nature allows them always to sacrifice their own to the
public good. Till then, however, something may be attained through the
existence of _one_ family whose good is quite inseparable from that of the
country; so that, at least in matters of importance, it can never advance
the one without the other. On this rests the power and the advantage of
the hereditary monarchy.