It is the outcome of his act, or his act returning upon himself, in a different way from that in which a man's act returns on himself when, having misused his body, he is visited according to physical necessity by painful consequences. The cause of the suffering which the act entails in the one case is the relation of the act to a society governed by the conception of rights; in the other it is not. For that reason, the painful consequence of the act to the doer in the one case is, in the other is not, properly a punishment. We do indeed commonly speak of the painful consequences of imprudent or immoral acts ('immoral' as distinct from 'illegal') as a punishment of them, but this is either metaphorically or because we think of the course of the world as regulated by a divine sovereign, whom we conceive as a maintainer of rights like the sovereign of a state. We may think of it as divinely regulated, and so regulated with a view to the realisation of moral good, but we shall still not be warranted in speaking of the sufferings which follow in the course of nature upon certain kinds of conduct as punishments, according to the distinctive sense in which crime is punished, unless we suppose the maintenance of rights to be the object of the moral government of the world,--which is to put the cart before the horse; for, as we have seen, rights are relative to morality, not morality to rights (the ground on which certain liberties of action and acquisition should be guaranteed as rights being that they are conditions of the moral perfection of society). While there would be reason, then, as against those who say that the punishment of crime is merely preventive, in saying that it is also retributive, if the needed correction of the 'merely preventive' doctrine could not be more accurately stated, it would seem that the truth can be more accurately stated by the proposition that punishment is not justified unless it is just, and that it is not just unless the act punished is an intentional violation of real right or neglect of real obligation which the agent could have avoided (i.e. unless the agent knowingly and by intentional act interferes with some freedom of action or acquisition which there is a public interest in maintaining), and unless the future maintenance of rights requires that the criminal be dealt with as he is in the punishment.[1] [1] The conceptions of the just and of justice implied in this statement of the conditions of just punishment may be expressed briefly as follows. 'The just' = that complex of social conditions which for each individual is necessary to enable him to realise his capacity of contributing to social good. 'Justice' is the habit of mind which leads us to respect those conditions in dealing with others,--not to interfere with them so far as they already exist, and to bring them into existence so far as they are not found in existence.