ion of evil without that
justification. The greater part of these common maxims have come into
use from the practice of courts of justice, which have been naturally
led to a more complete recognition and elaboration than was likely to
suggest itself to others, of the rules necessary to enable them to
fulfil their double function, of inflicting punishment when due, and of
awarding to each person his right.

That first of judicial virtues, impartiality, is an obligation of
justice, partly for the reason last mentioned; as being a necessary
condition of the fulfilment of the other obligations of justice. But
this is not the only source of the exalted rank, among human
obligations, of those maxims of equality and impartiality, which, both
in popular estimation and in that of the most enlightened, are included
among the precepts of justice. In one point of view, they may be
considered as corollaries from the principles already laid down. If it
is a duty to do to each according to his deserts, returning good for
good as well as repressing evil by evil, it necessarily follows that we
should treat all equally well (when no higher duty forbids) who have
deserved equally well of us, and that society should treat all equally
well who have deserved equally well of it, that is, who have deserved
equally well absolutely. This is the highest abstract standard of social
and distributive justice; towards which all institutions, and the
efforts of all virtuous citizens, should be made in the utmost possible
degree to converge. But this great moral duty rests upon a still deeper
foundation, being a direct emanation from the first principle of morals,
and not a mere logical corollary from secondary or derivative doctrines.
It is involved in the very meaning of Utility, or the
Greatest-Happiness Principle. That principle is a mere form of words
without rational signification, unless one person's happiness, supposed
equal in degree (with the proper allowance made for kind), is counted
for exactly as much as another's. Those conditions being supplied,
Bentham's dictum, 'everybody to count for one, nobody for more than
one,' might be written under the principle of utility as an explanatory
commentary.[D] The equal claim of everybody to happiness in the
estimation of the moralist and the legislator, involves an equal claim
to all the means of happiness, except in so far as the inevitable
conditions of human life, and the general interest, in wh