The rightful limit to self-interest

What is the rightful limit to self-interest?

Where does the authority of society begin?

How much of human life should be assigned to individuality, and how much to society?

Individuality should have the part of life in which it is chiefly the individual that is interested.

Society should have the part which chiefly interests society.

Society is not founded on a contract. Inventing a contract in order to deduce social obligations from it is for no good purpose. Everyone who receives the protection of society owes a return for the benefit.

This is done by:

1. Not injuring the interests of one another

2. In each person’s bearing his share (to be fixed on some equitable principle) of the labours and sacrifices incurred for defending the society or its members from injury and molestation.

These conditions society is justified in enforcing, at all costs to those who endeavour to withhold fulfilment. Nor is this all that society may do.

The acts of an individual may be hurtful to others, or lacking in consideration for their welfare, without violating any of their constituted rights.

The offender may then be justly punished by opinion though not by law.

As soon a person’s conduct affects prejudicially the interests of others, society has jurisdiction over it.

The question whether the general welfare will or will not be promoted by interfering with it, becomes open to discussion.

But there is no room for such a question when a person’s conduct affects only himself.

In all such cases there should be perfect freedom, legal and social, to do the action and stand the consequences.

My doctrine is not one of selfish indifference.

Selfish indifference pretends that humans:

• have no business with each other’s conduct in life
• should not concern themselves about the well-being of one another, unless their own interest is involved.

We meed a great increase of disinterested exertion to promote the good of others.

But disinterested benevolence can find other instruments to persuade people to their good, than whips and scourges, either of the literal or the metaphorical sort.

I am the last person to undervalue the self-regarding virtues; they are only second in importance, if even second, to the social.

Education should cultivate both.

But education works by:

• conviction
• persuasion
• compulsion

When the period of education is finished, the self-regarding virtues should be inculcated only through conviction.

They should be for ever stimulating each other to increased exercise of their higher faculties, and increased direction of their feelings and aims towards wise instead of foolish, elevating instead of degrading, objects and contemplations. But neither one person, nor any number of persons, is warranted in saying to another human creature of ripe years, that he shall not do with his life for his own benefit what he chooses to do with it.

He is the person most interested in his own well-being. The interest which any other person, except in cases of strong personal attachment, can have in it, is trifling, compared with that which he himself has.

The interest which society has in him individually (except as to his conduct to others) is fractional, and altogether indirect while, with respect to his own feelings and circumstances, the most ordinary man or woman has means of knowledge immeasurably surpassing those that can be possessed by any one else.

The interference of society to overrule his judgment and purposes in what only regards himself, must be grounded on general presumptions; which may be altogether wrong, and even if right, are as likely as not to be misapplied to individual cases, by persons no better acquainted with the circumstances of such cases than those are who look at them merely from without.

In this department, therefore, of human affairs, Individuality has its proper field of action. In the conduct of human beings towards one another, it is necessary that general rules should for the most part be observed, in order that people may know what they have to expect; but in each person’s own concerns, his individual spontaneity is entitled to free exercise.

Considerations to aid his judgment, exhortations to strengthen his will, may be offered to him, even obtruded on him, by others; but he himself is the final judge. All errors which he is likely to commit against advice and warning, are far outweighed by the evil of allowing others to constrain him to what they deem his good.

I do not mean that the feelings with which a person is regarded by others, ought not to be in any way affected by his self-regarding qualities or deficiencies. This is neither possible nor desirable.

If he is eminent in any of the qualities which conduce to his own good, he is, so far, a proper object of admiration. He is so much the nearer to the ideal perfection of human nature. If he is grossly deficient in those qualities, a sentiment the opposite of admiration will follow.

There is a degree of folly, and a degree of what may be called (though the phrase is not unobjectionable) lowness or depravation of taste, which, though it cannot justify doing harm to the person who manifests it, renders him necessarily and properly a subject of distaste, or, in extreme cases, even of contempt a person could not have the opposite qualities in due strength without entertaining these feelings.

Though doing no wrong to any one, a person may so act as to compel us to judge him, and feel to him, as a fool, or as a being of an inferior order and since this judgment and feeling are a fact which he would prefer to avoid, it is doing him a service to warn him of it beforehand, as of any other disagreeable consequence to which he exposes himself.

It would be well if this good office were much more freely rendered than the common notions of politeness at present permit, and if one person could honestly point out to another that he thinks him in fault, without being considered unmannerly or presuming.

We have a right, also, in various ways, to act upon our unfavourable opinion of any one, not to the oppression of his individuality, but in the exercise of ours. We are not bound, for example, to seek his society; we have a right to avoid it (though not to parade the avoidance), for we have a right to choose the society most acceptable to us.

We have a right, and it may be our duty, to caution others against him, if we think his example or conversation likely to have a pernicious effect on those with whom he associates. We may give others a preference over him in optional good offices, except those which tend to his improvement.

In these various modes, a person may suffer very severe penalties at the hands of others, for faults which directly concern only himself.

But he suffers these penalties only in so far as they are the natural, and, as it were, the spontaneous consequences of the faults themselves, not because they are purposely inflicted on him for the sake of punishment.

A person who shows rashness, obstinacy, self-conceit—who cannot live within moderate means—who cannot restrain himself from hurtful indulgences—who pursues animal pleasures at the expense of those of feeling and intellect—must expect to be lowered in the opinion of others, and to have a less share of their favourable sentiments.

But of this he has no right to complain, unless he has merited their favour by special excellence in his social relations, and has thus established a title to their good offices, which is not affected by his demerits towards himself.

What I contend for is, that the inconveniences which are strictly inseparable from the [Pg 147]unfavourable judgment of others, are the only ones to which a person should ever be subjected for that portion of his conduct and character which concerns his own good, but which does not affect the interests of others in their relations with him.

Acts injurious to others require a totally different treatment. Encroachment on their rights; infliction on them of any loss or damage not justified by his own rights; falsehood or duplicity in dealing with them; unfair or ungenerous use of advantages over them; even selfish abstinence from defending them against injury—these are fit objects of moral reprobation, and, in grave cases, of moral retribution and punishment.

Not only these acts, but the dispositions which lead to them, are properly immoral, and fit subjects of disapprobation which may rise to abhorrence.

Cruelty of disposition; malice and ill-nature; that most anti-social and odious of all passions, envy; dissimulation and insincerity; irascibility on insufficient cause, and resentment disproportioned to the provocation; the love of domineering over others; the desire to engross more than one’s share of advantages (the πλεονεξἱα [Greek= pleonexia] of the Greeks).