The moral rules which forbid mankind to hurt one another (in which we
must never forget to include wrongful interference with each other's
freedom) are more vital to human well-being than any maxims, however
important, which only point out the best mode of managing some
department of human affairs. They have also the peculiarity, that they
are the main element in determining the whole of the social feelings of
mankind. It is their observance which alone preserves peace among human
beings: if obedience to them were not the rule, and disobedience the
exception, every one would see in every one else a probable enemy,
against whom he must be perpetually guarding himself. What is hardly
less important, these are the precepts which mankind have the strongest
and the most direct inducements for impressing upon one another. By
merely giving to each other prudential instruction or exhortation, they
may gain, or think they gain, nothing: in inculcating on each other the
duty of positive beneficence they have an unmistakeable interest, but
far less in degree: a person may possibly not need the benefits of
others; but he always needs that they should not do him hurt. Thus the
moralities which protect every individual from being harmed by others,
either directly or by being hindered in his freedom of pursuing his own
good, are at once those which he himself has most at heart, and those
which he has the strongest interest in publishing and enforcing by word
and deed. It is by a person's observance of these, that his fitness to
exist as one of the fellowship of human beings, is tested and decided;
for on that depends his being a nuisance or not to those with whom he is
in contact. Now it is these moralities primarily, which compose the
obligations of justice. The most marked cases of injustice, and those
which give the tone to the feeling of repugnance which characterizes the
sentiment, are acts of wrongful aggression, or wrongful exercise of
power over some one; the next are those which consist in wrongfully
withholding from him something which is his due; in both cases,