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
sympathizes, 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 it 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