Society And its Purpose
Book 1 - Society
CHAPTER 1
The bonds uniting human beings with things and persons
25. Human beings have relationships with things and persons. Relationships pertain to the ideal order.
26. In addition to relationships, human beings establish effective bonds with persons and the things around them. These bonds pertain to the order of realities.
27. Necessary, immutable relationships constitute laws(4) which must be respected by all.
28. Bonds are simply facts, which either 1. conform or not to laws; or 2. are arbitrary, that is, are neither positively willed nor positively prohibited by laws.
29. These facts, posited by human beings outside the law, so to speak, and constituting effective bonds, give rise in the order of ideas to new relationships with the things and persons to which human beings are tied, and thus stimulate new laws.
30. The simplest, most general relationships of human beings with things and persons are ultimately those of means and end.
31. Relative to human beings, things are means, persons are end.
32. From these two fundamental relationships descend all the moral laws which must govern human behaviour towards things and persons. The first law, governing human conduct towards things, states: `Human beings must use things as means to the end proper to human beings.’ The second law, governing human conduct towards persons, states: `Human beings must treat persons as end, that is, as having their own end.’ Included in this second law are the duties we have towards ourselves as persons.
33. Effective, real bonds correspond to these two relationships of means and end. In fact, we all have the faculty of binding and uniting to ourselves an infinite number of things and persons.
34. We bind and unite to ourselves all things outside us which we find useful; we make them our own and mark them out for ourselves. In this way we establish a bond of ownership.
We also bind and unite persons to ourselves, and ourselves to them. But this union, proper to persons, differs entirely from our union with things: we do not consider persons as advantageous for ourselves (in this case they would be the same as things), but as people in whose company we can enjoy the advantages offered by things. Persons united in this way acquire a communion in good, and together form a single end; things are only a means to the end which all persons have in common. This is a bond of society.
35. The bond of ownership has its basis in usefulness to the person who binds himself to things; the bond of society has its basis in the mutual benevolence of persons who bind themselves to one another. These two bonds are obviously and essentially different.
36. We rely on our intelligence both in the case of relationships pertaining to the order of ideas and in the case of bonds pertaining to the order of things These bonds bind us to all beings (things or persons) who differ from ourselves.
It is pure intelligence that enables us to know the relationships of beings; with its help and guidance we can, as active beings, bind ourselves to various kinds of beings according to the different relationships they have with us and amongst themselves.
Without intelligence, therefore, there would be neither ownership nor society: human beings would not know what they owe to themselves or others. Consequently, they could not foresee or calculate the different uses and advantages they and others with them could obtain from the use of things, nor make firm plans about those things for the future.
Consequently, dominion and society pertain only to beings endowed with reason, not to irrational beings; they develop pari passu with the development of reason.
Notes
(4) Cf. Principles of Ethics, ch. 1, where I have shown that properly speaking the law is only an idea or notion which directs our actions.