Rights In Civil Society
Appendix 2. (1729).
Those who depend upon a tacit convention do not err as grossly as those who presuppose an expressed social contract which, according to Bossuet, is not preserved in any archive. I say they do not err so grossly because I cannot see how they can be absolved from all error. The word convention, or contract, in its proper meaning, presupposes an actual, positive adherence of will. It is indeed true that the presence of obligation amongst human beings requires a presupposed tacit consent between them; it is repugnant to imagine moral, rational, human nature acting contrary to itself. But to attribute the name of contract to this consent of human nature rather than to the actual, free consent of the individual will does not seem to me to accord with linguistic propriety. Monsignor Marchetti's use of stipulate, for example, in the following passage is simply metaphorical:
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We ought not to say that stipulation (of the social contract) is unknown in public registers. This argument would be valid for those who think of it as a real, factual event, but not for one who finds it in the register of the human mind which lays down stipulations for all that we do, and for everyone. Why is it the oddest thing in the world to suppose that reason has stipulated something for a father relative to his baby son? Does nature not speak on behalf of the child against the parent in China and in the Congo who drowns a superfluous child or leaves him exposed in the street? Can even the slave iure bello be treated unnaturally because you have the right to take away his life? Kill him if you like, but as long as life remains it is the life of a human being who falls under the stipulation established by his reason, a human being whom you must use as a human being. You tread on the stool when you get into your carriage because the stool is made of wood; its nature makes no stipulation with the person who uses it. A human being, however, even as a slave whose life you can take, stipulates because of the respect his nature demands. The tribunal of the whole of humanity will always condemn as barbarians those conquerors, such as Sapor the Persian or other Eastern monsters, who trod on their prisoners, treating them like animals or even killing them without reasonable, proportionate intent. (Della Chiesa quanto allo stato politico, Confer. 9, section 2, n. 68) |