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CONNATURAL RIGHTS

Chapter 6

Injury to innate rights

84. Lawful actions therefore which do not harm another's ownership do not injure the innate rights of others; they simply limit the sphere of their lawful actions, which, as we have said, are not of right, precisely because they are only lawful.(32)

85. We now wish to see when and to what extent connatural rights are injured. For this we must turn to the general principle we have posited regarding the determination of injury(33) and apply it to this kind of rights.

86. The principle states that `innate rights are injured whenever an attempt is made which disturbs or harms our innate faculties, person or human nature.'

87. Formal right is determined by the exclusion of ownership,(34) and consists in pure jural freedom.

88. Hence, in order to determine if formal right has been injured, we simply have to recognise injury in any attack on pure jural freedom.(35)

89. When does an attack on pure jural or personal freedom take place? If this freedom consists, as we have seen, in the supremacy the human person has over all the other principles of human nature, `an attack on this freedom, which constitutes innate formal right, will take place whenever the attack tries to rob the personal principle of its supremacy and subjugate it to some lower principle.'

90. But when exactly do we attempt to rob the human formal principle of its supremacy and subjugate it to some lower principle of human nature? To answer the question, we must investigate what constitutes, properly speaking, the supremacy of the personal principle over the other subsistent principles in human nature.

91. Our investigation shows us that such supremacy consists in the subject's participation in an infinite entity, and in the subject's ability to obtain from this infinite entity, in which it shares, an activity superior to all its other activities. As we have said, the subject does this in a way similar to that by which obedience given by a human being to a higher authority is of its nature immune from every subjection to a lower authority. The infinite entity is being itself in all its purity, without adjunct or limitation.

92. Whenever the attempt is directed to disturbing or altering the natural union and order of the subject to pure being, there is an attack on the supremacy of the personal principle and consequent injury to person.

93. In order to apply this principle and see when and how it is verified, we must carefully consider that the human subject can adhere to being in three modes: 1. through the intellect, by sharing in truth; 2. through the faculty of will, by the practice of virtue; 3. through feeling, by the enjoyment of happiness or bliss.(36)

94. When we examine truth, virtue, and bliss attentively, we discover that they are simply an adhesion or adherence of the human spirit to pure being, that is, a communication of this pure being, essential to the human spirit; it is a triple communication because effected in a threefold way.

95. In Certainty I showed that truth is being as the light of minds, where it produces knowledge.(37) I showed that all knowledge terminates in an entity, because the opposite of entity is nothingness, which cannot in itself be the object of knowledge. Knowing a truth is the same as knowing an entity. By means of knowledge or its faculty (the intellect), the human being adheres to being.

96. In my works on Ethics I showed that virtue consists in adhering willingly to being, that is, in acknowledging and loving the whole of being without excluding any part of it.(38)

97. Finally I have observed elsewhere(39) that, because we are not sufficient for ourselves, we tend to complete and fully satisfy ourselves by uniting ourselves to beings different from ourselves. Only by uniting ourselves to and enjoying the whole of being do we understand how it is possible to be in a state of such complete satisfaction that we cannot think of a higher state. This state is called happiness or bliss.

98. The three modes by which the human subject unites himself or is united to being are perfectly distinct. This distinction does not originate from the difference of the powers to which being is communicated. It originates from the threefold nature of being itself which, by communicating itself in its triple mode, produces three distinct powers to receive it.(40)

99. Being, in fact, when considered in its purity and fullness, is seen to be endowed with a triple act. The act in which it appears as object, and in so far as it is this act, we call ideal being. The act in which it appears as active subject which feels its passions and actions, and in so far as it is this act of feeling, we call real being. Finally, the act with which this real being, this subject, determines itself to feel and act in conformity with the rule of ideal being (object), and in so far as it is this act of adherence, we call moral being. When any real being whatsoever, a human being for example, intuits ideal being, the real being is said to share in truth. When the real being takes ideal being as the rule of its feelings and actions in so far as they depend on the real being, it is said to be endowed with virtue. In so far as it comes to love and enjoy the fullness of b eing, guided by the rule of ideal being taken in its universality, it is called blessed. Truth, virtue and bliss are therefore the three terms of the human person, or rather of person in general; they are the purest founts from which flows to person its own excellence, its dignity and its supremacy.(41)

100. We can now clearly see that every attempt to rob a human being of truth or virtue or happiness is an injury to the formal right that person is.(42)

But these three kinds of injury must be considered separately and a few words said about each.

101. What we have said so far indicates that injury to person by an attempt to deprive the human being of truth is perpetrated in three ways:
1. By positively harming the understanding, which is the power of truth. For example, the Hottentots' practice of placing boards on the temples of their babies in order to stupefy them is clearly a violation of a human right. The same right is injured by making someone drunk, intemperant, or by performing acts against a human being which result in weakening or disordering the power of knowledge.(43)
2. By limiting without just reason the exercise of the power of knowledge through caprice, evil will or display of superiority, etc. This violates innate jural freedom.
3. Finally, by attempting to introduce harmful errors into the mind of another. These diminish the possession of truth.

102. Here the general question arises: `Is lying an injury to the human right to truth?'

103. The opinion of jurists is divided on the matter. Some emphasise the evil consequences of lying, considering it an injury to right only when the consequences are really harmful.(44) But this is to depart from our question; we wish to talk about lying itself and the evil intrinsically contained in it.

104. In the first place, it is certain that a human being per se has no right to claim that the knowledge possessed by another be communicated to him. Such a communication pertains to beneficence, not to jural duty. If someone says to another, `I will tell you nothing about what you wish to know,' the speaker acts justly, from a jural point of view, and remains within the sphere proper to him without invading the other's sphere.

105. If the other, therefore, without a just motive, wants to apply pressure by using force or menacing the speaker in order to be told what the speaker does not wish to reveal, the aggressor injures the speaker's right. Having been violated or threatened, the speaker can now defend his right against the aggression even with force, provided he observes moderamen inculpatae tutelae [moderation in justified self-defence], about which we will have more to say later.

106. But an important question now presents itself: `Does a person who unjustly attacks another to make him say what he does not wish to say lose the right we all have to hear words used with the meaning given them by common use?'

107. Note carefully, I am not asking whether speaking contrary to the truth is always an evil relative to God, a question which concerns moralists. I am not discussing the duty of a speaker but the right of someone who unjustly claims that he be given information. To repeat, I am asking whether one who unjustly attacks another to make the latter say what he is not obliged to say loses the right to have the words spoken in reply used with their common meaning. For a long time I was persuaded that this right could in no way be lost, but now my persuasion inclines more to the opposite opinion.
I fully grant that we have the reciprocal duty and right to use words according to their accepted meaning, and never to use them in another sense when we speak spontaneously without pressure from injustice. It is equally clear that the fear of some harm, when such harm is just and not caused by another's injustice, does not in any way release me from the jural duty of telling the truth or of remaining silent.(45)

Finally, whenever a person has the right to know something from me, I have the corresponding jural obligation to speak, and to speak the truth, whatever the consequences of my honesty.

Our question therefore does not concern these cases, which are beyond discussion, but only the case where a person who has no right to know the truth and to whom I am not obliged by law to tell the truth wishes me to tell the truth contrary to my will and, by inflicting on me or menacing me with physical evils, violates my right of jural freedom .

108. In this case, it seems, the person loses the right he might have to require the common use of words. Furthermore, if I replied giving my words a false meaning, I would not be doing him any harm, because what I said would be neither true nor false, but simply a means of defending my right, a measure available to me for avoiding his violence.

109. An unjust person such as this could not claim to have been deceived. He has lost his right to the legitimate use of words, and therefore is obliged to know that my words have lost all value for him as a punishment for the injustice he has committed and continues to commit. If he takes the words according to their normal meaning, I am not deceiving him he is deceiving himself with his own ignorance.

110. I repeat however that this argument can be applied only in the case where there is no duty to reveal the truth independently of the right of a person violently demanding knowledge. If the duty to say or confess the truth comes from elsewhere, it must always be fulfilled, even in the face of certain death. There are situations in fact where the truth must be stated and proclaimed in the face of torture, because truth certainly has its own rights which are more sacred than those of any human being.(46)

111. We shall leave this case aside, however, and deal with the case discussed previously. The speaker has no intention of deceiving the unjust oppressor, as he does when telling a real lie. His sole intention is to hide from the oppressor the truth which he does not wish to reveal; he has no duty to do reveal the truth, and the oppressor has no right to know it, particularly when its revelation would greatly harm the innocent person responsible for its disclosure.

112. But this explanation would, of course, have no force if words naturally signified things. In this case I could not pronounce a word without signifying something; my intention cannot change the nature of things. However, words in themselves are sounds without any meaning whatsoever. Their meaning depends entirely on an expressed or tacit agreement among human beings, who by that fact show they intend to use them to express their concepts. We note therefore that the obligation to use words to mean something, and particularly one thing rather than another, does not come from the nature of words, as if they were born servants of truth and falsehood, but solely from the tacitly approved agreement or intention to use words for the purpose of expressing concepts. But in my opinion nobody intends to bind themselves by such a rigid and unjust agreement to use words necessarily in this way. This is especially true when one party abuses the entirely arbitrary agreement in order to force the other party unjustly to do something to which they are not bound, that is, to reveal truths which they wish to conceal because they would do themselves great harm by revealing them. Can anyone who acts so unjustly claim any right, or have the right to abuse his own right in this way? Can there be a right whose object is injustice and injury to some other person?

113. I gladly leave the solution of this delicate case to the judgment of wise people, but maintain nevertheless that every time a real, fraudulent lie is told, another person's right is injured, that is, the right each has `not to be deceived' by other people.

114. This injury is present even when no deception actually results from the lie because, as we have said, the attack itself without its effect is sufficient to constitute a jural injury.

115. Despite all this, we cannot in my opinion conclude that every lie injures pure formal right. We can only conclude that every lie injures every human being's acquired right, and this kind of right, we said, enters society by means of tacit agreement about the use of words. But rights acquired through agreement are not innate.

116. Does the case exist, and when, of a falsehood or lie that violates our connatural right not to be cut off from the truth or disturbed in our union with it?

Truth ennobles human beings, and any attempt to deprive them of it is an attempt to rob them of their inborn dignity. Truth, however, does not mean all that is true(47) nor all true knowledge. There are certain kinds of knowledge which do not increase personal human dignity, and certain kinds of false knowledge or material errors which do not diminish it. For example, surely no one will tell me that I would be improved by the knowledge that a hundred chickens were fed in Pip's courtyard? or that I would have lost something if I falsely believed a hundred and one were fed, instead of a hundred? Such an error would obviously not affect my personal dignity in any way.

117. It is equally true, however, that there is no knowledge, no matter how frivolous, which in certain circumstances cannot be useful to me. Ignorance itself can be useful, and even error in certain determined cases (legists and the writers of weighty tomes on the privileges of ignorance know this). However, we must note that here we do not calculate the value of truth from its consequences or from the advantages it can bring us. We calculate it from its own intrinsic value. Its simple adherence to our spirit ennobles and enhances us, without regard to all the other advantages we might be able to obtain from it.

118. If we now investigate which truths are useless to the personal dignity of our spirit, we will find that they all concern merely contingent things. Knowledge of such things is useful for what it produces, but its whole nobility is due to that element of universal knowledge which is united to it and makes it knowledge. This element is present in our mind even without other kinds of information. Our mind can in fact know the essence of a contingent thing and have its idea without knowing whether the thing really subsists or is a mere possibility.

119. Conversely, because our mental lights depend upon essences, our spirit is always ennobled and enhanced by the intuition of possibilities, that is, of essences of things. Other kinds of knowledge are obtained from the application of the lights. What is added to the lights in these applications is neither light nor truth, and therefore not the infinite element which renders us persons.

120. There is however a being, knowledge of which ennobles us. It is a real, subsistent being, which, although real, is not contingent. This necessary Being, as infinite reality and complete, subsistent truth, ennobles us by communicating itself to us.

121. This teaching means that not every lie offends pure-formal right, but only those lies in which there is an evil attempt to infuse erroneous principles, whether logical, moral, or religious, into our minds. These are the errors which truly disturb and diminish the adherence of our spirit to the light of truth.

122. This injury also can be perpetrated in three ways:
1. By attempting to destroy someones good dispositions towards virtue. We do this when we introduce obscure errors into their mind, or affections contrary to virtue into their spirit. This injury is very often an effect of the preceding injury which seeks to deprive human beings of the light of truth and to diffuse in them the darkness of error.
2. By attempting without just cause to limit the sphere of free actions which can help the acquisition of virtue. This is done either through caprice or evil will, such as the mere pleasure of exerting superiority, etc. It is an abuse which violates every persons jural freedom, that is, the right to acts contained virtually in our powers.
3. By attempting to seduce someone to commit a crime or carry out any action whatsoever opposed to duty, or simply by attempting to maliciously prevent someone from performing an act of virtue.

All these attacks are injuries to the right to the moral virtue we each have in our personship, even if the attacks have no real effect.

123. The second way of offending the right to virtue (by limiting the sphere of lawful actions helpful to the acquisition of virtues) includes in a general way the removal of means useful for their acquisition, when the deprivation is carried out for no reason at all or for a frivolous or culpable reason, and therefore unjustly.

124. Everybody therefore has the right `to choose the mode of life they judge to be more conducive to obtaining moral good, provided they do not harm the rights of others'.(48) This in turn means that the right to virtue is injured whenever an individual or government places obstacles to free choice.

125. Personship is also injured directly whenever there is an attempt to deprive human beings of their present or future fulfilment and happiness. This kind of injury sometimes results from the preceding kinds, because the state of fulfilment and happiness depends on the possession of truth and virtue.

126. Moreover we can hinder anothers state of fulfilment by impeding or disturbing his jural freedom of action, or by harassing another in any way at all, when the degree of harassment exceeds the strength of the person being maliciously harassed.

127. We sometimes see wickedness and hatred so engrained in the human heart that it endeavours to deny the hated person happiness in the life to come. This is the greatest violation imaginable of natural and supernatural personal right,(49) a monstrous fact frequently encountered in the history of the factions and bitter hatreds that raged between the leading families of Italy during the 12th century and afterwards.

128. Connatural ownership extends to everything contained in human nature. Hence this right is injured whenever anyone with a positive act harms any part or faculty whatsoever of the human nature which envelops every individual, whether babe or adult.

129. Slavery is a multiple and total violation of this innate right.

130. If by slavery we understand the use which one human being claims he can constantly make of another simply as a means for his own ends, the state of slavery contains many actions which are as injurious to innate ownership (nature) as to innate jural freedom (person). Indeed, we can say that slavery virtually includes within itself every possible violation of every single human right.(50)

131. Understood in this sense slavery cannot be maintained for a single instant, nor abolished only gradually by governments it must be annihilated at one stroke.

132. The concept of slavery in Roman laws was not explicitly of this kind. Roman law conceived a human being as having no civil state or rights recognised by positive laws. The slave was a human being who was not a member of society.

133. The concept of a human being who is not a member of civil society would not in itself, properly speaking, be the concept of a slave in the sense first mentioned. But it was implicitly the concept of slavery among pagan nations, because they claimed that civil society was everything; they did not recognise or tolerate anything outside that society. To be excluded from this kind of civil society (whose concept belongs to paganism and is thoroughly unjust) was the same as being excluded from the state of nature. Anyone who was not a member of the society was in fact no longer considered a human being, and consequently could be used like an animal. The natural principle itself, neminem non laedere [harm no one], was recognised by the laws as relative to members of the association, but not considered applicable to those who were not part of the association. Hence the pretensions of pagan civil laws which vaunted themselves as the absolute authority, superior to all other authority, even the natural law, and possessing the power to limit and alter this law at pleasure; their laws were a true tyranny of law. To be just, State laws must always recognise an authority superior to them: the authority of the rational law and of God. Christianity has subjected civil laws to this limitation, rendering them just and worthy of respect. But we will have to return to such an important topic when we discuss social Right.

134. Granted the distinction we have made between nature and human person, the attacks on personship discussed above, or at least some of them, can be perpetrated not only by other human beings, but by ourselves against ourselves.

135. In this case, although we sin against the moral law, we cannot say there is injury to right, because, as we have seen, right is always relative to another person.(51)

136. The same can be said when we consent to the attack on ourselves. This is confirmed by the common human feeling expressed in the dictum, scienti et consentienti non fit injuria [no injury is done to the person who knows and consents].

137. But injury begins at the moment our consent is retracted, which can and must always be done.

138. This is one of the principal characteristics of the difference between simply moral duties and jural duties. Duties to oneself cannot be other than moral duties.

(32) Many writers have not made this important distinction between simply lawful actions and actions of right. They have supposed that innate rights include not only the innate faculties but the possible actions of these faculties. And because possible, lawful actions can vary and be limited in different ways, one of which is by positive law, they have supposed that innate rights could be modified by positive laws. This supposition is clearly evident in the Austrian code where it reads: `Everything conformable to natural, innate rights will be held to be subsistent, as long as a legal restriction of these rights is not proven' (§17).

(33) Cf. ER, 360 ss.

(34) Cf. ER, 59-67.

(35) Formal right is the form of all rights. Every injury to right therefore is an injury to formal right. But we are speaking about injuries which concern merely formal right and pure jural freedom in itself, unmixed with any matter of right.

(36) Cf. the difference between happiness and bliss in SP, bk. 4, c. 1.

(37) Cf. CE, 1055-1064, 1112-1135.

(38) Cf. PE, etc.

(39) Cf. SP, bk. 4, especially c. 6.

(40) As long as this communication has not begun, we cannot have the concept of the relevant powers; at most we can conceive a truly indeterminate receptivity which simply proffers the mind a concept similar to the prime matter of the ancient thinkers.

(41) In SP I have shown that happiness, the full satisfaction of the spirit, is a personal act (bk. 4, c. 2).

(42) Truth is an absolute good and not relative to the subject, even though it endows the subject with a good beyond price. The subject is ordered to absolute, objective good. By means of this order alone, or more properly speaking, by means of the dignity of objective, absolute good, the subject has the right to tend to it. This order and tendency are not properly speaking the title of these rights but solely their condition. We can therefore say that some rights have as their object absolute good; others, good relative to the subject. This observation allows us to explain and fully understand the third element of right (cf. ER, 294-308).

(43) Cf. C. A. Titman, Dissertatio de delictis in vires humanas commissis, Leipzig, 1795.

(44) `In a jural sense,' says Zeiller, `only that subjective, moral lie must be considered a transgression of a jural duty which, because of its natural and easily foreseeable consequences, harms another's right.' - He notes that `as a result, no one in the State thinks of accusing someone before the courts as a liar except in the case of harm to the victim of a fraudulent, proven deceit' (§54 of his Diritto privato naturale).

(45) A special case is that of a judge in the external forum, who certainly has the right to interrogate. It is also clear that in civil cases the parties questioned must reply, and reply exactly in accordance with truth, because they themselves are equally bound to seek only truth and justice. Finally, in criminal cases, witnesses must on interrogation speak the truth fully and precisely. But the matter is not so clear when we are dealing with a criminal judgment concerning oneself. If the guilty person wishes to speak, he certainly may do so, and in this case must always speak the truth, because the judge has the right not to be deceived. But is a guilty person always obliged to confess his crime, even when he foresees the punishment that will be applied as a result of his confession? - Jurists are inclined to answer affirmatively; they think that the contrary would destroy the force of laws restraining crime. Some laws however (for example, English laws) do not require a confession from the accused, and do not in fact admit it as evidence. Nevertheless some moralists make a distinction worthy of serious consideration. In their opinion, if the punishment inflicted by criminal laws were absolutely just, that is, if retribution for the crime could not be made in another way, the accused would certainly be obliged to confess the truth and undergo the punishment. But external punishment inflicted by the State does not have this characteristic. An accused can make retribution for his crime before God and before human beings without ascending the scaffold. In this way he can restore the justice he has violated to its prior integrity. Without any doubt, an accused can fully repent of his misdeed, resolve to compensate as far as possible the harm done, and by his life to give as good an example to the world as he gave scandal in the past. Finally he can resolve to satisfy divine justice in the way divine justice prescribes. What further debt need he pay? The laws are not rendered useless in any way by his action, because they obtain their purpose superabundantly. However, this decision, as we see, is valid only for criminals fully converted from their evil ways. Those who remain obstinate are jurally obliged to confess their crimes in the external forum and to undergo the punishment imposed on them by the State judge.

(46) The above opinion cannot therefore be applied in any way to the obligation of every Christian to confess the Gospel even before tyrants. As an obligation, confession of the Gospel originates not from a tyrant's right but from the sublimity of gospel truth and from Christ's precept given to all Christians as his followers. It arises from the intrinsic right of God to be known, honoured and glorified in every way and before all creatures, from the duty of everyone to desire the establishment and spread of his kingdom on earth, from the merits of Christ, to follow whom must be considered infinitely glorious, from the Christian's perfect friendship with Christ, which spurs him on to glorify his friend, and finally, from supernatural charity to one's neighbour, by which the Christian must ardently desire that the Gospel be promulgated in all possible ways and that everybody will embrace it. Witness to all this is greatly aided by confession and the shedding of one's blood. - The teaching which we have given above concerning our duty to use words in their normal sense pertains to natural law and is therefore altogether different from the obligation of confessing Christ before violent men of the world who seek to snuff out his law and followers on the earth.

(47) I have indicated the difference between things that are true and truth itself in Saggio sull'Iddio e sulla nuova letteratura italiana in Opuscoli filosofici, Milan, 1828, vol. 2.

(48) I refer the reader to SP, bk. 2, cc. 12 and 13, where I have discussed this right at length.

(49) Rights and duties also exist in the supernatural order. A study dealing with rights of such a sublime nature would be something new, and would throw great light on how the social system should be conceived among Christian peoples relative to the well-being of Christianity.

(50) A principle exists in human beings which is not only morally but physically inalienable. It is the principle of personal freedom considered in itself independently of the good or evil objects to which its action is directed. To talk about a true alienation of the principle would be an absurd, contradictory discourse, a simultaneous affirmation and denial. Whenever we are talking about personal freedom, we are speaking about the essence of freedom. `Essence of freedom' contains a concept contrary to that of alienation, or belonging to another. Although the good sense of humankind has not succeeded in formulating this truth, it has always intuitively seen it, and our most ordinary reasonings take it for granted. For example, Plautus clearly expresses it in `Glorious Soldier':

In `Amphitruo' the slave Sosia tells Mercurius unhesitatingly:
I swear YOU WILL NEVER PREVENT ME FROM BEING PART OF US.
(Act 1, Sc. 1, v. 243)

He does not see how he can cease to be proper to himself, which would indeed be an absurdity. For the same reason human laws do not recognise ownership in a person subject to the dominion of another. The principle of all external ownership is ownership of oneself, which terminates in personal freedom as its ultimate root and apex. We have said that `immorality is simply an attempt to perform the absurd, to contradict the truth, to oppose being'. This truth which stems from the essence of morality is once again clearly evident here. Slavery, after all, is simply an attempt to prevent that principle from being free in the human being which cannot but be free, because it is freedom itself.

(51) Cf. ER, 299.

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