Carneades's Plank¹

Circumstantial Justice In Extremis?
Lactantius and Bacon on Carneades's Plank

(as related by Lactantius)

IT IS NOT JUST TO KILL A MAN, and not to lay hold of someone else’s property. So what will the just man do if he happens to be shipwrecked, and a weaker man has got hold of a plank? Won’t he push him off and get on himself and use it to escape—especially since there are no witnesses in the middle of the ocean? If he is smart, he will do it: he will have to die if he doesn’t, and if he prefers to die rather than life a hand against someone else, then he will be just but stupid in losing his own life while sparing another’s. Likewise, if in battle his own side is routed and the enemy is pursuing, and the just man gets hold of a wounded man on a horse, will he spare him at the cost of his own death, or will he knock him off the horse so that he can escape the enemy himself? If he does so he is smart but wicked, and if he doesn’t he is just but stupid.

* * *

Commentary by Sir Francis Bacon

(From his Maximes of the Law)²

SO IF DIVERS BEE IN DANGER OF DROWNING by the casting away of some boate or barge, and one of them get to some plancke, or on the boates side to keepe himself above water, and another to save his life thrust him from it, whereby hee is drowned; this is neither se defendendo nor by misadventure, but justifiable.

Endnotes

¹ Taken from Lactantius, Divine Institutes 5.18.4 [3.4oa3s], quoted in Cicero, On the Commonwealth and On the Laws (James E. G. Zetzel, ed.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 68-69. ⇑

² Francis Bacon, The Elements of the Common Lawes of England (Union, N.J.: The Lawbook Exchange, 2003) (facsimile reprint of 1630 edition), 29. ⇑