The State Of Nature; And Common Interest As The Origin Of Justice

The state of nature is:

• the imaginary state which preceded society
• a mere fiction, like the golden age invented by poets.
• full of war, violence and injustice.

Whereas, the golden age is the most charming and peaceable condition imaginable.

The poets say that the seasons in that first age of nature were so temperate, that people did not need clothes and houses against the heat and cold.

• The rivers flowed with wine and milk.
• The oaks yielded honey.
• Nature spontaneously produced her greatest delicacies.
• Only mild storms were known to humans then.
• Avarice, ambition, cruelty, selfishness, were never heard of.
• Cordial affection, compassion, sympathy, were the only movements known by the mind.
  • Even the distinction of ‘mine and thine’ was banished.
• People carried with them the very notions of property and obligation, justice and injustice.

This idle fiction deserves our attention because it shows the origin of those virtues, which are the subjects of our present enquiry.

Justice is created from human conventions.

These conventions are intended as a remedy to some inconveniences from the concurrence of:

• certain qualities of the human mind, and
  • These qualities are selfishness and limited generosity.
• the situation of external objects.
  • The situation is their easy change, joined to their scarcity relative to people’s wants and desires.

Poets have been guided infallibly by a certain taste or common instinct.

In most kinds of reasoning, this taste goes farther than anything we have known.

They easily perceived that the jealousy of interest, which justice supposes, could no longer have place:

• if every person had a tender regard for another, or
• if nature supplied abundantly all our wants and desires.

There would be no need for those distinctions and limits of property and possession currently used by mankind.

Increase the benevolence of people or the bounty of nature, and you render justice useless by replacing it with:

• much nobler virtues, and
• more valuable blessings

The selfishness of people is animated by the few possessions we have, in proportion to our wants.

It is to restrain this selfishness that people have been obliged:

• to separate themselves from the community, and
• to distinguish between their own goods and those of others.

We observe that:

• a cordial affection renders all things common among friends, and
• married people in particular mutually:
  • lose their property, and
  • are unacquainted with the mine and thine.

This mine and thine are so necessary, but cause such disturbance in human society.

The same thing happens when things become so abundant as to satisfy all of our desires.

In this case:

• the distinction of property is entirely lost, and
• everything remains in common.

We can see this in the air and water, the most valuable of all external objects.

Justice and injustice would be equally unknown among mankind:

• if men were supplied with everything in the same abundance, or
• if everyone had the same affection and tender regard for everyone as for himself.

Justice derives its origin only from the selfishness and confined generosity of men, along with the scanty provision nature has made for his wants.

This proposition gives an additional force on some of our previous observations on justice.

From this principle, we may conclude the following.

1. A strong extensive benevolence or a regard to public interest is not our first and original motive for the observation of the rules of justice.

If men were endowed with such a benevolence, these rules would never have been dreamt of.

The sense of justice is not founded on reason, or on the discovery of certain connections and relations of eternal, immutable, and universally obligatory ideas.

A change in mankind’s temper and circumstances would entirely change our duties and obligations.

It would then be necessary, on the common system, for the sense of virtue to be derived from reason.

Reason is supposed to show the change in the relations and ideas.

But man’s generosity and perfect abundance would destroy the very idea of justice because they render justice useless.

• His confined benevolence and necessitous condition give rise to justice only by making it requisite to public and private interest.

Therefore, a concern for the public and private interest made us establish the laws of justice.

This concern is not brought by any relation of ideas.

• It is brought by our impressions and sentiments [feelings]. *

Without these, everything in nature:

• is perfectly indifferent to us, and
• can never affect us.

Therefore, the sense of justice is not founded on our ideas, but on our impressions.

Those impressions, which give rise to this sense of justice, are not natural to the human mind, but arise from artifice and human conventions.

Any considerable alteration of temper and circumstances destroys justice and injustice equally.

Any such alteration only changes the private and public interest.

It follows that the first establishment of the rules of justice depends on these different interests.

But if people pursued the public interest naturally and heartily, they would never have dreamed of restraining each other by these rules.

If they pursued their private interest freely, they would run head-long into every kind of injustice and violence.

Therefore, these rules are artificial.

• They seek their end in an oblique and indirect manner.

Interest does not give rise to rules which could be pursued by people’s natural passions.