Wednesday, January 11, 2006

Chapter V THE RIGHT OF LIFE AND DEATH

THE question is often asked how individuals, having no right to dispose of their own lives, can transfer to the Sovereign a right which they do not possess. The difficulty of answering this question seems to me to lie in its being wrongly stated. Every man has a right to risk his own life in order to preserve it. Has it ever been said that a man who throws himself out of the window to escape from a fire is guilty of suicide? Has such a crime ever been laid to the charge of him who perishes in a storm because, when he went on board, he knew of the danger?

The social treaty has for its end the preservation of the contracting parties. He who wills the end wills the means also, and the means must involve some risks, and even some losses. He who wishes to preserve his life at others' expense should also, when it is necessary, be ready to give it up for their sake. Furthermore, the citizen is no longer the judge of the dangers to which the law-desires him to expose himself; and when the prince says to him: "It is expedient for the State that you should die," he ought to die, because it is only on that condition that he has been living in security up to the present, and because his life is no longer a mere bounty of nature, but a gift made conditionally by the State.

The death-penalty inflicted upon criminals may be looked on in much the same light: it is in order that we may not fall victims to an assassin that we consent to die if we ourselves turn assassins. In this treaty, so far from disposing of our own lives, we think only of securing them, and it is not to be assumed that any of the parties then expects to get hanged.

Again, every malefactor, by attacking social rights, becomes on forfeit a rebel and a traitor to his country; by violating its laws be ceases to be a member of it; he even makes war upon it. In such a case the preservation of the State is inconsistent with his own, and one or the other must perish; in putting the guilty to death, we slay not so much the citizen as an enemy. The trial and the judgment are the proofs that he has broken the social treaty, and is in consequence no longer a member of the State. Since, then, he has recognised himself to be such by living there, he must be removed by exile as a violator of the compact, or by death as a public enemy; for such an enemy is not a moral person, but merely a man; and in such a case the right of war is to kill the vanquished.

But, it will be said, the condemnation of a criminal is a particular act. I admit it: but such condemnation is not a function of the Sovereign; it is a right the Sovereign can confer without being able itself to exert it. All my ideas are consistent, but I cannot expound them all at once.

We may add that frequent punishments are always a sign of weakness or remissness on the part of the government. There is not a single ill-doer who could not be turned to some good. The State has no right to put to death, even for the sake of making an example, any one whom it can leave alive without danger.

The right of pardoning or exempting the guilty from a penalty imposed by the law and pronounced by the judge belongs only to the authority which is superior to both judge and law, i.e., the Sovereign; each its right in this matter is far from clear, and the cases for exercising it are extremely rare. In a well-governed State, there are few punishments, not because there are many pardons, but because criminals are rare; it is when a State is in decay that the multitude of crimes is a guarantee of impunity. Under the Roman Republic, neither the Senate nor the Consuls ever attempted to pardon; even the people never did so, though it sometimes revoked its own decision. Frequent pardons mean that crime will soon need them no longer, and no one can help seeing whither that leads. But I feel my heart protesting and restraining my pen; let us leave these questions to the just man who has never offended, and would himself stand in no need of pardon.

1 Comments:

Blogger JasonJ said...

In this chapter Rousseau brings up some interesting points about the citizen's responibilities to the sovereign. What catches my eye here in regards to Mannning's original argument against Rousseau is the statement "and when the prince says to him: 'It is expedient for the State that you should die,' he ought to die, because it is only on that condition that he has been living in security up to the present, and because his life is no longer a mere bounty of nature, but a gift made conditionally by the State."

I find this interesting because this is another one of those talking points that is often quoted out of context. I therefore feel that I need to clear this matter up before moving on. As taken by itself, one could get that icy chill up and down his spine that this is some forebearer of Marx' Communist Manifesto statements about assuming totalitarian control of a people in coup de etat style for their own good in an effort to 'educate' them properly; but what Rousseau was really stating is clearly written here if we just stop to analyse the context.

All members of a society are taken as equals by the nature of the social compact. It is assumed that men are free to live their lives as they see fit, providing their liberties do not impinge upon the rights of their fellow citizens. We take this so fundamentally in Americana that I'm not sure I need to clarify this concept any further at this time. Having said that, Rousseau states that along with the enjoyment of personal safety that society affords man comes the responsibility that one must also defend that safety for his fellow man at a reduced personal risk.

We should not be surprised to find that self-preservation is the root of all society. There are many activities which one man can not accomplish as an individual that two or more may need and can accomplish together. I like to use the following anecdote.

Suppose two men stumble upon a large log. Both men need fire to keep warm and cook their food. Neither man can carry the log by himself, but together they can easily carry off. Common sense says they cooperate and share in the spoils of their mutual labor. I don't think this is anything radically new to anyone but this is the sort of fundamental reasoning that needs to be applied to this argument. Society exists for the mutual preservation of all its members. All who live under its protection are sworn implicitly for the preservation of that society from enemies at home and abroad.

Now is it ever in the best interest of the state to declare that one must die? Under what circumstances would this be best? Certainly, it cannot be said that the state should seek the death of a member for its amusement. We would expect that the whole of a state would not ask more of one member than of another. But what about when one member harms another as men are capable of doing? And who must defend the state from foreign enemies? Obviously the members who enjoy the protection must come to the mutual aid of the collective. This does not mean that the state should or could have the right or will to arbitrarily decree that one should die for its whim.

Sat Feb 04, 07:50:00 AM CST  

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