Doctrine of Natural Rights 101
enter into a dispute with such an authority as Justice Holmes
but merely to point out what seems to me to be the logic
of his position. If it is justifiable, as he maintains, to sacri-
fice a human life for the sake of a valuable ship’s cargo,
surely it is a fortiori justifiable to sacrifice lives en masse
for the ends of the State which certainly infinitely transcend
the value of any ship’s cargo. If there are no absolute values
underlying law, which he, as an instrumentalist, denies,
surely there are no limits, except in individual feeling, to
which this purely pragmatic view of law may not lead. Both
Marxian and National Socialism have, as we shall see,
drawn the inevitable consequences.
Indeed I recall a distinguished professor in one of our
most important law schools who was willing to go to the
limit in this matter. He once remarked in the presence of
myself and a well-known English theologian, partly no doubt
to get a rise out of two old-fashioned moralists, that he saw
no valid reason why he should not go out on the street and
kill a man if he so desired, if he was willing to take the con-
sequences. The theologian did not bite. He simply took his
pipe out of his mouth and quietly remarked, “I am glad I
met you in our host’s drawing room and not on a dark
street.”
Do I embarrass you by this plain speaking? Well, I think
we ought to be embarrassed by the situation in which mod-
ern law and politics finds itself. This rake’s progress of
modern law is precisely the degradation of democratic
dogma of which Henry Adams speaks. I think we should
be aware of this degradation. I think we should also under-
stand how closely it is connected with the degradation of
scientific dogma described in the preceding lecture. This
democratic dogma rests upon a philosophy of nature and of
man which, it is thought, modern science has made impos-
sible. To this aspect of the problem we must now turn.