Economic Justice

This contrariety of passions would have a small danger if it did not concur with our outward circumstances.

Different goods provide us with:

• the internal satisfaction of our minds, We are perfectly secure in the enjoyment of this. the external advantages of our body, and This may be ravished from us by others. But they can get no advantage in doing so. the enjoyment of those possessions acquired by our industry and good fortune. These are exposed to the violence of others. These may be transferred without suffering any loss or alteration. There are not enough of these goods to supply everyone’s desires and necessities. The improvement of these goods is the chief advantage of society. Their scarcity and the instability of their possession is the chief impediment.

We should not: expect to find a remedy to this inconvenience, in uncultivated nature, or hope for any inartificial principle of the human mind which might: control those partial affections, and make us overcome the temptations arising from our circumstances. The idea of justice can never: serve this purpose, nor be a natural principle which can inspire men with an equitable conduct towards each other. Justice would never have been dreamed of among savage men. Because the notion of injury or injustice implies an immorality committed against another person. Every immorality is derived from some defect or unsoundness of the passions. This defect must be judged of from the ordinary course of nature in the mind’s constitution. It will be easy to know whether we are guilty of any immorality with regard to others by considering the natural and usual force of those affections. In the original frame of our mind, our strongest attention is confined to ourselves. Our next attention is extended to our relations and acquaintances. Only the weakest reaches to strangers and indifferent persons. This partiality and unequal affection must have an influence on our: conduct in society, and ideas of vice and virtue. This makes us regard any remarkable transgression of such partiality as immoral. We may observe this when we blame a person who: centers all his affections in his family, or is so regardless of them to give the preference to a stranger. Our natural uncultivated ideas of morality, instead of providing a remedy for the partiality of our affections, rather: conform themselves to that partiality, and give it an additional force and influence.

The remedy, then, is not derived from nature, but from artifice. Nature provides a remedy in the judgment and understanding, for what is irregular and incommodious in the affections.

Early education makes men sensible of society’s infinite advantages.

Men observe that the principal disturbance in society arises from:

• external goods, and

• the looseness of external goods and their easy transition from one person to another.

  They seek a remedy by putting these goods on the same footing with the fixed and constant advantages of the mind and body.

    This can only be done by a convention entered into by all the members of the society to:
        bestow stability on the possession of those external goods, and
        leave everyone in the peaceful enjoyment of what he may acquire by his fortune and industry.
  

  Through this, everyone knows what he may safely possess. The passions are restrained in their partial and contradictory motions. This restraint is not contrary to these passions, for if so, it could never be entered into nor maintained. It is only contrary to their heedless and impetuous movement. This convention best consults our interests and those of our friends. Because we maintain society through this consultation of our all our interests.

  This convention is not of the nature of a promise. For even promises arise from human conventions. Only a general sense of common interest: is expressed by all the members of the society to one another, and induces them to regulate their conduct by certain rules. It will be for my interest to leave another man with his goods, provided he will do the same thing for me. He has the same interest to regulate his conduct. When this common sense of interest is mutually expressed and is known to both, it produces a suitable resolution and behaviour. This may properly enough be called a convention or agreement between us, though without a promise. Since our own actions: have a reference to the actions of others, and are performed on the supposition that something is to be performed on the other part. Two men pulling the oars of a boat do it by an agreement or convention, though they have never given promises to each other. The rule concerning the stability of possession is less derived from human conventions. It arises gradually. It acquires force by: a slow progression, and our repeated experience of the inconveniences of transgressing it. On the contrary, this experience assures us further that the sense of interest has become common to all our fellows. It gives us a confidence of the future regularity of their conduct. Our moderation and abstinence are founded only on the expectation of this. In a like manner: languages are gradually established by human conventions without any promise, and gold and silver: become the common measures of exchange, and are esteemed sufficient payment for something 100 times their value.