“ Every man has a right to risk his own life in order to preserve it. ”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (1762). copy citation
Author | Jean-Jacques Rousseau |
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Source | The Social Contract |
Topic | life risk self-defence |
Date | 1762 |
Language | English |
Reference | Of the Social Contract, or Principles of Political Law, Book II |
Note | Translated by George Douglas Howard Cole |
Weblink | https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Social_Contract/Book_II |
Context
“THE question is often asked how individuals, having no right to dispose of their own lives, can transfer to the Sovereign a right which they do not possess. The difficulty of answering this question seems to me to lie in its being wrongly stated. Every man has a right to risk his own life in order to preserve it. Has it ever been said that a man who throws himself out of the window to escape from a fire is guilty of suicide? Has such a crime ever been laid to the charge of him who perishes in a storm because, when he went on board, he knew of the danger?”
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Original quote