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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: for the claims of his fellows. The iustinct of rights being of itself entirely selfish, merely impels its possessor to maintain his own rights. Only by the sympathetic excitement of it, is a desire to behave equitably to others awakened; and when sympathy is absent such a desire is impossible. Further proof may be found in the fact, that some of the peculiar moral notions traceable to these sentiments are perfectly in harmony with certain of the abstract conclusions arrived at in the preceding chapter. We find in ourselves a conviction, for which we can give no satisfactory reason, that we are free, if we please, to do particular things which it is yet blamable to do. Though it may greatly diminish his happiness, a man feels that he has a rigkt, if he likes, to cut off a finger, or to destroy his property. While we condemn the want of consideration he shows towards some miserable debtor, yet we admit that the hard creditor is, in strict justice, entitled to the uttermost farthing. Notwithstanding our disgust at the selfishness of one who refuses to afford some friendly accommodation, we cannot deny that he is quite at liberty to refuse. Now these perceptions which, if the hypothesis be true, are referable to the instinct of personal rights, acting in the one case directly and in the other cases sympathetically, quite accord with foregoing inferences. We found that the law of equal freedom is the fundamental law. We found (p. 40) that no other limitations of activity could be as authoritative as that which it sets up. And we found further (p. 41) that in this, our state of adaptation, it would be wrong to establish any fixed boundary to the liberty of each, save the similar liberties of others. Such a correspondence between our instinctive beliefs and the conclusions previously ...
| ISBN-13 | 9780217553704 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10 | 0217553702 |
| Weight | 0.94 Pounds |
| Dimensions | 9.00 x 6.00 x 0.65 In |
| List Price | $22.63 |
| Format | Paperback |
|---|---|
| Pages | 288 pages |
| Publisher | |
| Published On | 2009-08-01 |
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