Читать книгу Encyclopedic Liberty - Jean Le Rond d'Alembert - Страница 33
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This article was controversial in its time and continues to be interpreted in different ways. Praised by the friendly Journal encyclopédique (February 15, 1756), it was attacked by Abraham Chaumeix in his Préjugés légitimes, II, 78–80, for attempting to free human beings of their obligations to God and country, leaving them with merely a vague duty to the “human species.” “You are a citizen of the world, and a patriot of nowhere. You have to do nothing, conceive of nothing, meditate on nothing except the temporal interests of yourself and other men,” he sums up Diderot’s pernicious doctrine. Some later commentators have seen Diderot’s “general will” in the light of Rousseau’s, but others see it as more like Adam Smith’s universal principle of sympathy in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. For his part, Rousseau criticized this article in the first version of the Social Contract (bk. 1, chap. 2), though the chapter was deleted in the definitive version.1
*NATURAL RIGHTS2 (Morality). These words are used so frequently that almost everyone is convinced that they are clearly understood. This feeling
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is common to the philosopher and to the man who does not think, with the only difference that in regard to the question “What are rights?” the latter, in that moment lacking both terms and ideas, refers you to the tribunal of conscience and remains silent, while the first is only reduced to silence and to more profound reflections after having turned in a vicious circle that brings him back to the very point from which he departed or draws him to some other question that is not less difficult to resolve than the one he thought he was rid of by its definition.
The philosopher under question says: “Rights are the foundation or the primary object of justice.” But what is justice? “It is the obligation to render to each person what belongs to him.” But what belongs to one rather than to another in a state of things where everything belongs to everyone and where perhaps the distinct idea of obligation would not yet exist? And what would an individual owe to others if he were to allow them everything and ask nothing of them? It is here that the philosopher begins to feel that of all the notions of morality, that of natural rights is one of the most important and most difficult to determine. Therefore we believe we will have accomplished a great deal in this article if we have succeeded in clearly establishing a few principles that might assist someone to resolve the most considerable difficulties customarily proposed against the notion of natural rights. For this purpose it is necessary to discuss the question thoroughly and to advance nothing that is not clear and evident, with at least the kind of evidence that moral questions permit and that satisfy every sensible man.
(1) It is evident that if man is not free or if his instantaneous resolutions or even his indecision arise from something material that is external to his soul, then his choice is not the pure act of an incorporeal substance or of a simple faculty of that substance; there will therefore be neither rational benevolence nor rational malevolence, although it is possible to be both benevolent and malevolent at an animal level; there will be neither good nor evil in the moral sense, neither right nor wrong, neither obligation nor privilege. Hence we see, although we say it in passing, how important it is to establish firmly the reality, I do not say of what is voluntary, but of freedom, which is too often confused with the former.
(2) We live in a state of being that is poor, contentious, and anxious. We have passions and needs. We want to be happy; and at every moment the
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unjust and passionate man feels inclined to do to others what he would not wish to have done to himself. This is a judgment he makes at the bottom of his soul and that he cannot avoid. He sees his own malevolence and must admit it to himself, or grant to everyone the same authority that he arrogates to himself.
(3) But with what can we reproach a man who is tormented by passions so violent that even life becomes an onerous burden if he does not satisfy them and that in order to acquire the right to dispose of the existence of others, abandons to them his own? What shall we answer him if he intrepidly says, “I feel that I bring terror and disorder in the midst of mankind, but I must either be unhappy or make others unhappy; and nobody is dearer to me than I am to myself. Let no one reproach me with this abominable predilection: it is not free. It is the voice of nature that never explains itself more powerfully than when it speaks to me in my favor. But is it only in my heart that it makes itself heard with the same violence? O men! it is to you I appeal: which one among you who on the point of death would not buy back his life at the expense of the greater part of the human race if he could count on impunity and secrecy? But he will continue: I am fair and sincere; if my happiness demands that I destroy the lives of all those who disturb me, it is also necessary for an individual, whoever he may be, to be able to destroy mine if he is similarly disturbed; reason requires this, and I subscribe to it; I am not so unjust as to insist upon a sacrifice from another person that I do not wish to make for him.”
(4) I perceive first of all one thing that seems to me acknowledged by the good and the evil person, that we must apply reason in all matters, because man is not only an animal but an animal who reasons; that there are consequently, in regard to the question under discussion, ways to discover the truth; that the person who refuses to search for it renounces his human condition and must be treated by the rest of his species as a wild beast; and that the truth once discovered, whoever refuses to conform to it is mad or evil practicing a morality of malevolence.
(5) What shall we therefore answer our violent reasoner before we stifle him? That his entire discourse is reduced to knowing if he acquires the right over the lives of others by abandoning his own to them; because he does not want only to be happy, he wants to be fair and by his fairness
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brush far away from him the epithet of evil person; without which it would be necessary to stifle him without an answer. We shall therefore draw his attention to the fact that even if what he abandons would belong to him so completely that he were able to dispose of it at will, and that the condition that he proposes to others would be even advantageous to them, he has no legitimate authority to make them accept it; that the person who says “I want to live” has as much justification as the person who says “I want to die”; that the latter has only one life and by abandoning it makes himself the master of an infinity of lives; that his exchange would be hardly equitable if there were only himself and another evil person on the entire surface of the earth; that it is absurd to make others desire what one desires; that it is uncertain that the peril in which he places his fellow man is equal to the one to which he really wishes to be exposed; that what he allows to chance cannot be of proportionate value compared to what he forces me to chance; that the question of natural rights is much more complicated than it appears to him; that he appoints himself as judge and plaintiff, and that this matter would certainly not fall within the competence of his court.
(6) But if we take away from the individual the right of deciding about the nature of right and wrong, where shall we place this great question? Where? Before the entire human race; for only they may decide the issue, since the good of all is the only passion they have, particular wills are suspect; they can be good or evil, but the general will is always good: it is never wrong, it never will be wrong. If animals were on an approximate level with us, if there were certain means of communication between them and us, if they were able to convey clearly their feelings and thoughts and know ours with the same clarity: in a word, if they were able to vote in a general assembly, it would be necessary to summon them there, and the cause of natural rights would no longer be pleaded before humanity but before the animal kingdom [animalité]. But animals are separated from us by invariable and eternal barriers; and it is a question here of a category of knowledge and ideas peculiar to mankind which emanate from its dignity and which constitute it.
(7) It is to the general will that the individual must address himself to know up to what point he must be a man, a citizen, a subject, a father, a child, and when it is suitable to live or to die. The general will determines
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the limits of all duties. You have the most sacred natural rights in everything that is not contested by the entire species. They will enlighten you on the nature of your thoughts and your desires. Everything that you will conceive, everything that you will contemplate will be good, noble, exalted, and sublime if it is in the general and common interest. The only essential quality in your species is what you demand from all your fellow men for your happiness and for theirs. It is this conformity of you with all of them and all of them with you that will mark you when you go beyond or stay within the limits of your species. Therefore never lose sight of it; otherwise you will see the notions of benevolence, justice, humanity, and virtue blurred in your understanding. Say often to yourself: I am a man, and I do not have any other truly inalienable rights than those of humanity.
(8) But you will say to me, where is the depository of this general will? Where could I consult it? In the principles of law written by all civilized nations; in the social practices of savage and barbaric peoples; in the tacit conventions between enemies of mankind among themselves; and even in the feelings of indignation and resentment, these two passions which nature seems to have placed even in animals to compensate for the deficiency of laws in society and the blemish of public vengeance.
(9) If you therefore meditate carefully on the foregoing, you will remain convinced: (i) that the man who listens only to his particular will is the enemy of the human race; (ii) that the general will in each individual is a pure act of understanding that reasons in the silence of the passions about what man can demand of his fellow man and about what his fellow man can rightfully demand of him; (iii) that this consideration of the general will of the species as well as the common desire is the rule of conduct relating one individual to another in the same society, one individual to the society of which he is a member, and the society of which he is a member to other societies; (iv) that the submission to the general will is the bond of all societies, without excluding those formed by crime (alas! virtue is so beautiful that thieves respect its image in the very center of their dens!); (v) that the laws must be made for all and not for one, otherwise this solitary being would resemble the violent reasoner whom we have stifled in section 5; (vi) that since of the two wills, the one general and the other particular, the general will never falls into error, it is not difficult to see on which one,
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for the happiness of the human race, the legislatures ought to depend, and what veneration we owe the august mortals whose particular wills reunite both the authority and the infallibility of the general will; (vii) that if one were to assume the notion of the species being in perpetual flux, the nature of natural rights would not change, since it would always be related to the general will and to the common desire of the entire species; (viii) that equity is to justice as cause is to its effect, or that justice cannot be anything else than declared equity; (ix) that all these inferences are evident to the person who reasons, and that the person who does not wish to reason, renouncing his human condition, must be treated as an unnatural being.
