Читать книгу A Treatise on Political Economy - Antoine Louis Claude Destutt De Tracy - Страница 22

Finally, from the faculty of will arise our ideas of rights and duties.

Rights arise from wants, and duties from means.

Weakness in all its kinds is the source of all rights, and power the source of all duties; or in other words of the general duty to employ it well, which comprehends all the others.

These ideas of rights and duties are not so essentially correlative as is commonly said. That of rights is anterior and absolute.

An animated being by the laws of his nature has always the right to satisfy his wants, and he has no duties but according to circumstances.

A sentient and willing being, but incapable of action, would have all rights and no duties.

This being supposed capable of action, and insulated from every other sensible being, has still the same plenitude of rights, with the sole duty of properly directing his actions and well employing his means for the most complete satisfaction of his wants.

Place this same being in contact with other beings who develop to him their sensibility too imperfectly to enable him to form conventions with them; he has still the same rights, and his duties or rather his sole duty is only changed, so far as he must act on the will of these beings, and is under a necessity to sympathise more or less with them. Such are our relations with animals.

Suppose this same sensible being in relation with beings with whom he can completely communicate and form conventions, he has still the same rights unlimited in themselves, and the same sole duty.

These rights are not bounded, this duty is not modified by the conventions established; but because these conventions are so many means of exercising these rights, of fulfilling this duty better and more fully than before.

The possibility of explaining ourselves and not agriculture, grammar and not Ceres, is our first legislator.

It is at the establishment of conventions that the just and unjust, properly speaking, commence.