Читать книгу Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation. Reprinted from Green's Philosophical Works, vol. II., with Preface by Bernard Bosanquet онлайн

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15. Only outward acts, then, can be matter of legal obligation; but what sort of outward acts should be matter of legal obligation? The answer to this question arises out of the above consideration of the means which law employs to obtain the fulfilment of obligations, combined with the view of law as relative to a moral end, i.e. the formation of a society of persons, acting from a certain disposition, from interest in the society as such. Those acts only should be matter of legal injunction or prohibition of which the performance or omission, irrespectively of the motive from which it proceeds, is so necessary to the existence of a society in which the moral end stated can be realised, that it is better for them to be done or omitted from that unworthy motive which consists in fear or hope of legal consequences than not to be done at all.

16. We distinguish, then, the system of rights actually maintained and obligations actually enforced by legal sanctions ('Recht' or 'jus') from the system of relations and obligations which should be maintained by such sanctions ('Naturrecht'); and we hold that those actions or omissions should be made obligations which, when made obligations, serve a certain moral end; that this end is the ground or justification or rationale of legal obligation; and that thus we obtain a general rule, of both positive and negative application, in regard to the proper matter or content of legal obligation. For since the end consists in action proceeding from a certain disposition, and since action done from apprehension of legal consequences does not proceed from that disposition, no action should be enjoined or prohibited by law of which the injunction or prohibition interferes with actions proceeding from that disposition, and every action should be so enjoined of which the performance is found to produce conditions favourable to action proceeding from that disposition, and of which the legal injunction does not interfere with such action.