morality. In our survey of the various popular acceptations of justice,
the term appeared generally to involve the idea of a personal right--a
claim on the part of one or more individuals, like that which the law
gives when it confers a proprietary or other legal right. Whether the
injustice consists in depriving a person of a possession, or in breaking
faith with him, or in treating him worse than he deserves, or worse than
other people who have no greater claims, in each case the supposition
implies two things--a wrong done, and some assignable person who is
wronged. Injustice may also be done by treating a person better than
others; but the wrong in this case is to his competitors, who are also
assignable persons. It seems to me that this feature in the case--a
right in some person, correlative to the moral obligation--constitutes
the specific difference between justice, and generosity or beneficence.
Justice implies something which it is not only right to do, and wrong
not to do, but which some individual person can claim from us as his
moral right. No one has a moral right to our generosity or beneficence,
because we are not morally bound to practise those virtues towards any
given individual. And it will be found, with respect to this as with
respect to every correct definition, that the instances which seem to
conflict with it are those which most confirm it. For if a moralist
attempts, as some have done, to make out that mankind generally, though
not any given individual, have a right to all the good we can do them,
he at once, by that thesis, includes generosity and beneficence within
the category of justice. He is obliged to say, that our utmost exertions
are due to our fellow creatures, thus assimilating them to a debt; or
that nothing less can be a sufficient _return_ for what society does for
us, thus classing the case as one of gratitude; both of which are
acknowledged cases of justice. Wherever there is a right, the case is
one of justice, and not of the virtue of beneficence: and whoever does
not place the distinction between justice and morality in general where
we have now placed it, will be found to make no distinction between them
at all, but to merge all morality in justice.

Having thus endeavoured to determine the distinctive elements which
enter into the composition of the idea of justice, we are ready to enter
on the inquiry, whether the feeling, which accompanies the idea, is
attached to it by