The sentiment of justice, in that one of its elements which consists
of the desire to punish, is thus, I conceive, the natural feeling of
retaliation or vengeance, rendered by intellect and sympathy
applicable to those injuries, that is, to those hurts, which wound
us through, or in common with, society at large. This sentiment, in
itself, has nothing moral in it; what is moral is, the exclusive
subordination of it to the social sympathies, so as to wait on and
obey their call. For the natural feeling would make us resent
indiscriminately whatever any one does that is disagreeable to us; but
when moralised by the social feeling, it only acts in the directions
conformable to the general good: just persons resenting a hurt to
society, though not otherwise a hurt to themselves, and not
resenting a hurt to themselves, however painful, unless it be of the
kind which society has a common interest with them in the repression
of.

  It is no objection against this doctrine to say, that when we feel
our sentiment of justice outraged, we are not thinking of society at
large, or of any collective interest, but only of the individual case.
It is common enough certainly, though the reverse of commendable, to
feel resentment merely because we have suffered pain; but a person
whose resentment is really a moral feeling, that is, who considers
whether an act is blamable before he allows himself to resent
it- such a person, though he may not say expressly to himself that he
is standing up for the interest of society, certainly does feel that
he is asserting a rule which is for the benefit of others as well as
for his own. If he is not feeling this- if he is regarding the act
solely as it affects him individually- he is not consciously just; he
is not concerning himself about the justice of his actions. This is
admitted even by anti-utilitarian moralists. When Kant (as before
remarked) propounds as the fundamental principle of morals, "So act,
that thy rule of conduct might be adopted as a law by all rational
beings," he virtually acknowledges that the interest of mankind
collectively, or at least of mankind indiscriminately, must be in
the mind of the agent when conscientiously deciding on the morality of
the act. Otherwise he uses words without a meaning: for, that a rule
even of utter selfishness could not possibly be adopted by all
rational beings- that there is any insuperable obstacle in the nature
of things to its adoption- cannot be even plausibly maintained. To
give any meaning to Kant's principle, the sense put upon it must be,
that we ought to shape our conduct by a rule which all rational beings
might adopt with benefit to their collective interest.

  To recapitulate: the idea of justice supposes two things; a rule
of conduct, and a sentiment which sanctions the rule. The first must
be supposed common to all mankind, and intended for their good. The
other (the sentiment) is a desire that punishment may be suffered by
those who infringe the rule. There is involved, in addition, the
conception of some definite person who suffers by the infringement;
whose rights (to use the expression appropriated to the case) are
violated by it. And the sentiment of justice appears to me to be,
the animal desire to repel or retaliate a hurt or damage to oneself,
or to those with whom one sympathises, widened so as to include all
persons, by the human capacity of enlarged sympathy, and the human
conception of intelligent self-interest. From the latter elements, the
feeling derives its morality; from the former, its peculiar
impressiveness, and energy of self-assertion.

  I have, throughout, treated the idea of a right residing in the
injured person, and violated by the injury, not as a separate
element in the composition of the idea and sentiment, but as one of
the forms in which the other two elements clothe themselves. These
elements are, a hurt to some assignable person or persons on the one
hand, and a demand for punishment on the other. An examination of
our own minds, I think, will show, that these two things include all
that we mean when we speak of violation of a right. When we call
anything a person's right, we mean that he has a valid claim on
society to protect him in the possession of it, either by the force of
law, or by that of education and opinion. If he has what we consider a
sufficient claim, on whatever account, to have something guaranteed to
him by society, we say that he has a right to it. If we desire to
prove that anything does not belong to him by right, we think this
done as soon as it is admitted that society ought not to take measures
for securing it to him, but should leave him to chance, or to his
own exertions. Thus, a person is said to have a right to what he can
earn in fair professional competition; because society ought not to
allow any other person to hinder him from endeavouring to earn in that
manner as much as he can. But he has not a right to three hundred
a-year, though he may happen to be earning it; because society is
not called on to provide that he shall earn that sum. On the contrary,
if he owns ten thousand pounds three per cent stock, he has a right to
three hundred a-year; because society has come under an obligation
to provide him with an income of that amount.

  To have a right, then, is, I conceive, to have something which
society ought to defend me in the possession of. If the objector
goes on to ask, why it ought? I can give him no other reason than
general utility. If that expression does not seem to convey a
sufficient feeling of the strength of the obligation, nor to account
for the peculiar energy of the feeling, it is because there goes to
the composition of the sentiment, not a rational only, but also an
animal element, the thirst for retaliation; and this thirst derives
its intensity, as well as its moral justification, from the
extraordinarily important and impressive kind of utility which is
concerned. The interest involved is that of security, to every one's
feelings the most vital of all interests. All other earthly benefits
are needed by one person, not needed by another; and many of them can,
if necessary, be cheerfully foregone, or replaced by something else;
but security no human being can possibly do without on it we depend