Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/206

192 EDWARD WESTEBMABCK : the discharge of a duty corresponding to a right is called " just," in the strict sense of the word, only the violation of a right is called " unjust ". At the same time " justice " and " injustice " are not simply other names for respecting and violating rights. It is true, as Adam Smith observes, 1 that " we may often fulfil all the rules of justice by sitting still and doing nothing," and that the man who barely abstains from violating either the person or the estate or the reputation of his neighbours is so far a just man. But we do not generally call him just. " Justice " involves something besides the mere respect for a right. Whenever we style an act " just " or " unjust," we emphasise its relative impartiality or partiality. We do not denominate murder and robbery unjust, but wrong or criminal, because the terms " murder " and " robbery " lay stress, not upon the iniquity of the act, but upon its general wrongness or criminality. We admit however at once their gross injustice, when we consider that the murderer and robber indulged their own inclinations with utter disregard of their neighbours' rights. And we look upon " unjust " as an exceedingly appropriate term for a judge who condemns an innocent man with the intention to save the culprit, and for an employer who robs his servants by withholding their stipulated wages. The essence of justice lies in impartiality within the recognised order of rights. This impartiality, as we have already seen, is only relative, because the distribution of rights itself may be partial. In a society which regards slavery as a morally permissible institution, a man is not necessarily deemed unjust if he beats a slave in a case where it would have been wrong to beat a free man. Jus- tice requires impartiality within the sphere of equal rights. A father is unjust if he gives away property to one of his children in preference to others, in case all of them are recognised to have a right to an equal share in his property, even though it be only a conditional right ; and a man is unjust if he keeps for himself a profit to which another man has an equal right. Moreover, in the case of unequal rights, justice admits of no greater "inequity" of treatment than what the difference in rights implies. It is just to punish a man who by a crime has forfeited that right to be protected from wilfully inflicted pain which every law-abiding citizen possesses, but it is unjust to extend the inequality between his condition and the condition of others beyond the in- 1 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Bohn's edition), p. 1 17