Part II, Chapter XXVII, 1

OF CRIMES, EXCUSES, AND EXTENUATIONS

What Sin Is

A sin is not only a transgression of a Law, but any contempt for the legislator. Such contempt breaks all his Laws at once. It may therefore consist not only in doing an act or speaking words the Laws forbid, or failing to do what the Law commands, but also in the intention or purpose to transgress. For the purpose of breaking a Law shows some degree of contempt for the person responsible for enforcing it. Merely taking pleasure in imagining oneself in possession of another person's goods, servants, or wife, without any intention of taking them by force or fraud, is no breach of the Law that says, “You shall not covet.” Nor is it a sin to take pleasure in imagining or dreaming of the death of someone from whose life one expects nothing but harm and distress; the sin lies in resolving to perform an act that tends toward his death. For delight in a fiction that would please us if it were real is a Passion so inherent in the nature of human beings and every other living creature that to make it a sin would be to make being human a sin. This consideration has made me think too severe, both toward themselves and others, those who maintain that the first stirrings of the mind are sins, even when checked by the fear of God. But I admit that it is safer to err on that side than on the other.

A crime is a sin consisting in doing, by deed or word, what the Law forbids, or failing to do what it commands. Thus every crime is a sin, but not every sin is a crime. To intend to steal or kill is a sin, even if it never appears in word or deed, for God, who sees human thoughts, can hold it against a person. But until it appears in something done or said, through which the intention may be discerned, it is not a crime. The Greeks observed this distinction in their words amartema and egklema or aitia. The first, translated as sin, signifies any departure whatsoever from the Law; the latter two, translated as crime, signify only a sin of which one person may accuse another. Intentions that never appear in any outward act afford no grounds for human accusation. Likewise the Latins use Peccatum, or sin, for every kind of departure from the Law, but crimen, which they derive from Cerno, meaning “to perceive,” only for sins that can be made visible before a judge, and therefore not for mere intentions.

From the relation of sin to Law, and of crime to civil Law, we may infer, first, that where Law ceases, sin ceases. But since the Law of Nature is eternal, breach of Covenants, ingratitude, arrogance, and all acts contrary to any moral virtue can never cease to be sins. Second, when civil Law ceases, crimes cease: with no Law remaining but that of Nature, there is no place for accusation, since everyone is his own judge, accused only by his own conscience and cleared by the uprightness of his own intention. When his intention is right, then, his act is no sin; if not, his act is a sin but not a crime. Third, when the Sovereign Power ceases, crime ceases too. For where there is no such Power, the Law affords no protection and everyone may protect himself by his own power: no one who establishes Sovereign Power can be supposed to surrender the right to preserve his own body, for whose safety all Sovereignty was established. This applies only to those who did not themselves contribute to destroying the Power that protected them, for to do so was a crime from the beginning.

The source of every crime is some defect of understanding, some error in reasoning, or some sudden force of the Passions. A defect of understanding is ignorance; a defect of reasoning is erroneous opinion. Ignorance, in turn, is of three kinds: ignorance of the Law, of the Sovereign, and of the penalty. Ignorance of the Law of Nature excuses no one, because everyone who has attained the use of reason is presumed to know that he should not do to another what he would not have done to himself. Wherever a person goes, then, to do anything contrary to that Law is a crime. If a man comes here from the Indies and persuades people to adopt a new religion, or teaches them anything tending toward disobedience to this country's Laws, however firmly he is convinced of the truth of what he teaches, he commits a crime and may justly be punished for it. This is not only because his doctrine is false, but because he does what he would not approve in someone coming from here and attempting to alter the religion there. Ignorance of civil Law, however, excuses a person in a foreign country until that Law is declared to him, for until then no civil Law binds him.

Likewise, if the civil Law of a person's own country has not been sufficiently declared for him to know it if he wishes, and the act is not against the Law of Nature, ignorance is a valid excuse. In other cases ignorance of civil Law does not excuse him.

Ignorance of the Sovereign Power where a person ordinarily lives does not excuse him, for he ought to know the Power that has protected him there.

Ignorance of the penalty where the Law has been declared excuses no one. Whoever breaks a Law—which, without fear of a penalty to follow, would be not a Law but empty words—incurs its penalty even if he does not know what it is. For whoever voluntarily acts accepts all the known consequences of the act, and punishment is a known consequence of violating the Laws in every Commonwealth. If the punishment has already been fixed by Law, he is subject to it; otherwise he is subject to a punishment fixed at discretion. It is reasonable that someone who injures another without any limit but his own will should suffer punishment subject to no limit but the will of the person whose Law he has violated.

But where a penalty is attached to a crime by the Law itself, or has customarily been imposed in similar cases, the offender is excused from any greater penalty. For a punishment known in advance, if not great enough to deter people, is an invitation to commit the act. When people compare the benefit of their injustice with the harm of their punishment, they necessarily choose whatever appears best for themselves. Thus when they are punished more severely than the Law had previously prescribed, or more severely than others were punished for the same crime, it is the Law that has tempted and deceived them.

No Law made after an act is done can make the act a crime. If it is against the Law of Nature, that Law existed before the act; and a positive Law cannot be known before it is made and therefore cannot yet bind. But when the Law forbidding an act is made before the act is done, its perpetrator is liable to a penalty prescribed afterward, if no lesser penalty was previously made known, either in writing or by example, for the reason just given.

Through defects of reasoning, that is, errors, people become inclined to violate the Laws in three ways. First, by presuming false principles. People observe that in every place and age unjust acts have been authorized by the force and victories of those who committed them; that powerful people have broken through the cobweb Laws of their country, while the weak and those who failed in their ventures alone have been regarded as criminals. From these observations they take as principles and grounds of reasoning: “Justice is only an empty word; whatever a person can obtain through his own effort and risk is his own; the practice of all nations cannot be unjust; the examples of former ages are good arguments for doing the same again,” and many others of this kind. Admit these principles, and no act can be a crime in itself: it must be made one not by the Law but by the success of those who commit it. The same act will be virtuous or vicious as fortune pleases, so that what Marius makes a crime Sylla makes meritorious and Caesar, while the same Laws remain in force, turns back into a crime, to the perpetual disturbance of the peace of the Commonwealth.

Second, through teachers who either misinterpret the Law of Nature, thereby making it conflict with civil Law, or teach as Laws their own doctrines or the traditions of former times when these are inconsistent with a Subject's duty.

Third, through erroneous inferences from true principles. This commonly happens to people who are hasty and precipitate in reaching conclusions and deciding what to do. They have a high opinion of their own understanding and believe that such matters need no time or study, only common experience and good natural wit, qualities no one thinks himself without; whereas no one claims knowledge of right and wrong, a no less difficult subject, without long and serious study. None of these defects of reasoning can excuse a crime, though some may lessen it, in anyone who claims to manage his own private affairs, much less in those who undertake public office: they claim to possess the very reason whose absence they would invoke as an excuse.

Among the Passions most frequently causing crimes is vainglory, a foolish overestimation of one's own worth, as though differences of worth were produced by wit, riches, blood, or some other natural quality rather than by the will of those who hold Sovereign Authority. From it comes the presumption that punishments prescribed by the Laws for all Subjects should not be inflicted on them as rigorously as on poor, obscure, and simple people, those included under the name of the common multitude.

Thus those who value themselves for the greatness of their wealth commonly venture to commit crimes in the hope of escaping punishment by corrupting public justice or buying a pardon with money or other rewards.

Those with many powerful relatives, and popular figures who have won standing among the multitude, likewise take courage to violate the Laws in the hope of overpowering the Power responsible for enforcing them.

And those with a high and false opinion of their own wisdom presume to censure the actions and question the authority of those who govern. By their public discourse they unsettle the Laws until nothing counts as a crime except what their own designs require to be one. The same people are also prone to crimes of cunning and deceit against their neighbors, since they think their designs too subtle to be detected. These, I say, are effects of a false presumption of their own wisdom. For of the first instigators of disturbance in a Commonwealth—which cannot take place without civil war—very few remain alive long enough to see their new designs established. Thus the benefits of their crimes pass to posterity and to those whom they would least have wished to benefit, showing that they were not so wise as they believed. Those who deceive in the hope of going unnoticed commonly deceive themselves: the darkness in which they think they are hidden is nothing but their own blindness. They are no wiser than children who think everything is hidden when they cover their own eyes.

And vainglorious people generally, unless also timid, are prone to anger, being more inclined than others to take the ordinary freedom of conversation as contempt. Few crimes cannot be produced by anger.

As for the Passions of hatred, lust, ambition, and covetousness, the crimes they tend to produce are so plain to everyone's experience and understanding that nothing need be said of them except this: they are weaknesses so bound to the nature of human beings and all other living creatures that their effects can be prevented only by an extraordinary use of reason or by consistently severe punishment. What a person hates constantly and unavoidably troubles him; either his patience must last forever or he must find relief by removing the power of the thing that troubles him. The first is difficult, and the second is often impossible without breaking a Law. Ambition and covetousness are Passions that press constantly upon us, while reason is not constantly present to resist them; whenever there appears to be hope of impunity, therefore, their effects follow. And what lust lacks in duration it possesses in intensity, enough to outweigh the prospect of any light or uncertain punishment.

Of all Passions, fear inclines people least to break the Laws. Indeed, apart from a few generous natures, when breaking the Laws promises profit or pleasure, fear alone makes people keep them. Yet fear can lead to a crime in many cases.

For not every fear justifies the act it produces, but only fear of bodily harm, which we call bodily fear, when a person sees no way to escape it except by acting. A man is attacked and fears immediate death, from which he sees no escape but to wound his attacker. If the wound kills the attacker, it is no crime: no one is presumed, in establishing a Commonwealth, to have abandoned the defense of his life or limbs where the Law cannot reach him in time to help. But to kill a man because his acts or threats suggest that he will kill me when he can, when I have time and means to seek protection from the Sovereign Power, is a crime. Again, a person suffers insulting words or slight injuries for which the lawmakers have assigned no punishment, regarding them as unworthy of notice by anyone with the use of reason. He fears that unless he takes revenge he will fall into contempt and so be exposed to like injuries from others; to avoid this he breaks the Law and seeks to secure himself against future injuries through the terror of his private revenge. This is a crime: the harm is not bodily but imaginary, and although a custom begun not many years ago among young and vain men in this part of the world has made it seem palpable, it is too slight for a gallant person confident in his own courage to notice. A person may also fear spirits through his own superstition or through excessive trust in others who tell him of strange dreams and visions. He may thus be led to believe the spirits will harm him if he does or refrains from various things, even though doing or refraining from them is contrary to the Laws. An act or omission so induced is not excused by this fear; it is a crime. For, as I showed earlier in the second chapter, dreams are naturally only images lingering in sleep from impressions our senses received while awake. When people are for some reason unsure that they have been asleep, these seem like real visions. Thus whoever presumes to break the Law on account of his own dream or another's, a supposed vision, or a fancy about the power of invisible spirits beyond what the Commonwealth permits, abandons the Law of Nature, which is certainly an offense, and follows the imagery of his own or another private person's brain. He can never know whether that imagery signifies anything at all, or whether the person who tells his dream speaks truly or lies. If every private person were allowed to do this—as they must be by the Law of Nature if any one of them is allowed—no Law could remain in force, and every Commonwealth would be dissolved.

ON CRIMES, EXCUSES, AND MITIGATING CIRCUMSTANCES

What Sin Is

A sin is not only a violation of a law but also any contempt for the legislator. Such contempt breaks all his laws at once. So a sin may consist not only in doing something or saying words the law forbids, or in failing to do what the law commands. It may also consist in intending or planning to break the law. A plan to break it shows some contempt for the person responsible for enforcing it. Suppose someone merely enjoys imagining that he possesses another person’s property, servants, or wife, without intending to take them by force or fraud. This does not break the law that says, “You shall not covet.” Nor does someone sin by enjoying the thought or dream of the death of a person whose life promises him nothing but harm and trouble. But resolving to take some action toward bringing about that death is a sin. Enjoying an imaginary event that would please you if it really happened is a passion so deeply rooted in human nature, and in the nature of every other living creature, that calling it a sin would make it a sin to be human. This has led me to think that those who call the first stirrings of the mind sins, even when they are checked by fear of God, are too severe on themselves and others. I admit, though, that it is safer to err in their direction than the other.

A crime is a sin committed by doing or saying what the law forbids, or by failing to do what it commands. Every crime is therefore a sin, but not every sin is a crime. Intending to steal or kill is a sin even if it never appears in words or deeds, for God sees a person’s thoughts and can hold him accountable. But until the intention appears in something said or done, by which it may become a crime, people cannot accuse him of it. The Greeks observed this distinction in the words amartema and egklema or aitia. The first, translated as “sin,” means any departure from the law. The other two, translated as “crime,” mean only a sin of which one person can accuse another. Human beings cannot accuse anyone of intentions that never show themselves in an outward act. Similarly, the Latin peccatum, meaning “sin,” describes every kind of departure from the law. But crimen, which they derive from cerno, meaning “to perceive,” means only sins that can be established before a judge, not mere intentions.

From the relation of sin to law, and crime to civil law, several conclusions follow. First, where law ends, sin ends. But because the Law of Nature is eternal, breaking covenants, ingratitude, arrogance, and acts contrary to any moral virtue can never cease to be sins. Second, when civil law ends, crimes end. Only the Law of Nature remains, and no one can bring an accusation under it. Each person is his own judge, accused only by his conscience and cleared by the honesty of his intention. If his intention is right, his action is not a sin. If it is not right, his action is a sin but not a crime. Third, when sovereign power ends, crime also ends. Without that power the law cannot protect anyone, so everyone may protect himself by his own strength. In setting up sovereign power, no one can be assumed to give up his right to preserve his own body, since all sovereignty was established for that purpose. But this applies only to those who did not themselves help destroy the power that protected them. Helping to destroy it was a crime from the start.

Every crime comes from some failure of understanding, some error in reasoning, or some sudden surge of the passions. A failure of understanding is ignorance; faulty reasoning produces mistaken opinions. There are three kinds of ignorance: ignorance of the law, of the sovereign, and of the penalty. Ignorance of the Law of Nature excuses no one. Anyone old enough to reason is expected to know that he should not do to others what he would not want done to himself. Wherever someone goes, acting against that law is therefore a crime. Suppose someone comes here from the Indies and persuades people to accept a new religion or teaches anything that encourages disobedience to this country’s laws. However firmly he believes his teaching is true, he commits a crime and may justly be punished. His doctrine is false, and he also does something he would disapprove of in another person who traveled from here to the Indies and tried to change the religion there. But ignorance of a foreign country’s civil law excuses a visitor until the law is made known to him, because until then that civil law does not bind him.

Likewise, if a person’s own country has not made a civil law known well enough for him to learn it if he wishes, and his act does not violate the Law of Nature, his ignorance is a valid excuse. In other cases, ignorance of civil law is no excuse.

Ignorance of the sovereign power where someone usually lives is no excuse. He should know what power has protected him there.

Where a law has been made known, ignorance of its penalty excuses no one. When someone breaks the law, he incurs its penalty even if he does not know what it is. Without the prospect of a penalty, the law would be empty words rather than law. Anyone who willingly acts accepts all known consequences of his act. In every commonwealth punishment is a known consequence of breaking the laws. If the law has already fixed the punishment, that is the one he faces. If not, he is subject to a punishment set at the sovereign’s discretion. It is reasonable that someone who injures another without any limit but his own will should face punishment without any limit but the will of the person whose law he has broken.

But if the law itself sets a penalty for the crime, or a particular penalty has usually been imposed for similar crimes, the offender is excused from a greater penalty. If the known punishment is not severe enough to deter people, it invites them to commit the act. People naturally compare what they would gain from injustice with what they would lose through punishment and choose what looks best for themselves. So if they are punished more severely than the law had specified, or than others have been punished for the same crime, it is the law that tempted and deceived them.

A law made after an act cannot make that act a crime. If the act violated the Law of Nature, the law already existed when the act occurred. A positive law, however, cannot be known before it is made and therefore cannot bind anyone earlier. But if a law forbidding an act was made before the act took place, the offender can be subjected to a penalty established afterward, provided that no lighter penalty had previously been made known, either in writing or by example. The reason is the one just given.

Errors in reasoning lead people to break laws in three ways. First, they assume false principles. For instance, they see that in every place and age, those who commit injustices can make those acts appear lawful through force and victory. Powerful people break through their country’s laws like cobwebs, while the weaker and those whose plans fail are the only ones regarded as criminals. Some therefore adopt these principles for their reasoning: “Justice is just an empty word. Whatever someone can gain by his own work and risk belongs to him. A practice followed by all nations cannot be unjust. Past examples are good reasons to do the same thing again.” There are many similar principles. If these are accepted, no act is a crime in itself. Whether it is a crime depends not on the law but on whether those who commit it succeed. The same deed becomes virtuous or vicious according to fortune. What Marius calls a crime, Sylla calls praiseworthy, and Caesar calls a crime again, although the laws have not changed. This constantly disturbs the peace of the commonwealth.

Teachers also lead people into error when they misinterpret the Law of Nature so that it appears to conflict with civil law, or teach their own doctrines or traditions from earlier times as laws even though they conflict with a subject’s duty.

Third, people draw mistaken conclusions from true principles. This commonly happens to people who rush to decide what to conclude and do. They think highly of their own understanding and believe these matters require no time or study, only ordinary experience and good natural intelligence—qualities everyone thinks he has. Yet no one would claim knowledge of right and wrong, which is no less difficult, without extensive and prolonged study. None of these errors in reasoning can excuse a crime by anyone who claims to manage his own affairs, though some errors may lessen its seriousness. Still less can they excuse someone who takes on a public office. Such people claim to have the very reasoning ability whose absence they would use as an excuse.

One passion that frequently causes crime is vanity: an absurdly high opinion of one’s own worth. People may imagine that differences in worth come from intelligence, wealth, ancestry, or some other natural quality, rather than from the will of those who hold sovereign authority. They then presume that penalties imposed by law on all subjects should not be applied to them as strictly as to poor, unknown, ordinary people, whom they call the common crowd.

Thus people who measure their worth by their wealth often risk committing crimes in the hope that they can bribe public officials, or buy a pardon with money or other rewards, and escape punishment.

Likewise, those with many powerful relatives, and popular figures with a reputation among the crowd, take courage to break the laws. They hope to overpower those responsible for enforcing them.

Those who have a high but false opinion of their own wisdom start criticizing the actions of rulers and questioning their authority. Their public statements undermine the laws until nothing counts as a crime except what suits their own plans. Such people are also drawn to crimes involving trickery and deception of their neighbors, because they think their schemes are too clever to detect. These are all results of their mistaken belief in their own wisdom. Very few of those who first stir up disorder in a commonwealth—which cannot happen without civil war—live long enough to see their new plans established. The benefits of their crimes go instead to later generations and to people they would least have wanted to benefit. They were therefore not as wise as they thought. People who deceive others in the hope of remaining unseen usually deceive themselves. The darkness they think conceals them is only their own blindness. They are no wiser than children who close their eyes and think that everything is hidden.

In general, vain people, unless they are also fearful, are quick to anger. More than others, they take ordinary conversational freedom as an insult. Anger can give rise to almost every kind of crime.

There is little need to describe the crimes that hatred, lust, ambition, and greed are likely to produce. Everyone knows from experience and common sense. But these passions are weaknesses so closely tied to human nature and to that of all other living things that their effects can be stopped only by unusual use of reason or by consistently severe punishment. People continually feel troubled by what they hate, and they cannot avoid the trouble. Either their patience must last forever or they must remove the power of whatever troubles them. Endless patience is hard; removing that power often cannot be done without breaking a law. Ambition and greed are also constant, pressing passions, while reason is not always present to resist them. Whenever people see a chance to escape punishment, these passions have their effects. Lust does not last as long, but its intensity makes up for its short duration. It can outweigh any fear of a mild or uncertain penalty.

Of all the passions, fear is the least likely to lead people to break laws. Indeed, except among some unusually generous people, it is the only thing that makes them obey when breaking the law seems profitable or pleasurable. Yet fear can also lead to crime in many cases.

Not every fear justifies the action it causes. Only fear of physical harm, which we call bodily fear, can do so, and only if a person sees no way to escape that harm except by acting. Suppose someone is attacked and fears he will be killed immediately. He sees no escape except to wound his attacker. If he wounds him fatally, this is no crime. When a commonwealth is established, no one is assumed to give up the defense of his life or limbs where the law cannot come to his aid in time. But it is a crime to kill someone because his actions or threats lead me to think that he will kill me when he can, if I have time and means to seek protection from the sovereign power. Again, suppose someone receives insults or slight injuries for which the lawmakers set no penalty, considering them beneath the notice of a reasonable person. He fears that unless he gets revenge, others will despise him and expose him to more such injuries. He therefore breaks the law to frighten people with his private revenge and protect himself in the future. This is a crime. The harm he fears is imaginary rather than physical. Although a custom begun not many years ago among vain young men in this part of the world has made that harm feel real, it is so slight that a brave person confident of his courage cannot take notice of it. Someone may also fear spirits because of his own superstition or because he trusts too much in others’ accounts of strange dreams and visions. He may be led to believe the spirits will harm him unless he does or refrains from certain things, even though doing or refraining from them would break the laws. His fear does not excuse the act or omission: it is a crime. As I explained in Chapter two, dreams are naturally just images that remain during sleep from impressions received by our senses while awake. If people are uncertain whether they have slept, those images seem to be real visions. So a person who breaks the law because of his own or someone else’s dream or supposed vision, or because of a belief about invisible spirits that the commonwealth does not permit, abandons the Law of Nature. That is a certain wrong. Instead, he follows images produced in his own mind or another private person’s mind. He cannot know whether those images mean anything, or whether the person reporting the dream tells the truth. If every private person were free to do this, as the Law of Nature would require if any one of them were free to do it, no law could remain in force and every commonwealth would dissolve.