 Individualism, a reader, edited by George H. Smith and Marilyn Moore, narrated by James Foster. Thirteen. From Vices Are Not Crimes, a Vindication of Moral Liberty. Lisander Spooner. Prohibition, a failure, or the true solution of the temperance question, D.O. Lewis, Boston, James R. Osgood and Company, 1875. Lisander Spooner, 1808-1887, was an American lawyer, abolitionist, and radical libertarian, who maintained that governments should be strictly limited to protecting the natural rights of individuals. The essay from which our excerpt was taken, Spooner's Vices Are Not Crimes, was first published anonymously in 1875 as a chapter in a book titled, Prohibition, a Failure, by the physician D.O. Lewis. Spooner's authorship remained generally unknown until after his death, when Benjamin Tucker mentioned it in his memorial of Spooner, which was published in the Anarchist Periodical Liberty. Spooner argues that vices are simply the errors which a man makes in his search after his own happiness, whereas crimes are actions that violate the rights of other people. He concludes that any effort to prohibit personal vices through the force of law is hypocritical, counterproductive, and profoundly unjust. One. Vices are those acts by which a man harms himself or his property. Crimes are those acts by which one man harms the person or property of another. Vices are simply the errors which a man makes in his search after his own happiness. Unlike crimes, they imply no malice toward others and no interference with their persons or property. In vices, the very essence of crime, that is, the design to injure the person or property of another, is wanting. It is a maxim of the law that there can be no crime without a criminal intent, that is, without the intent to invade the person or property of another, but no one ever practices a vice with any such criminal intent. He practices his vice for his own happiness solely and not from any malice toward others. Unless this clear distinction between vices and crimes be made and recognized by the laws, there can be on earth no such thing as individual right, liberty, or property. No such things as the right of one man to the control of his own person and property and the corresponding and co-equal rights of another man to the control of his own person and property. For a government to declare a vice to be a crime and to punish it as such is an attempt to falsify the very nature of things. It is as absurd as it would be to declare truth to be falsehood or falsehood truth. 2. Every voluntary act of a man's life is either virtuous or vicious. That is to say, it is either in accordance or in conflict with those natural laws of matter and mind on which his physical, mental, and emotional health and well-being depend. In other words, every act of his life tends on the whole either to his happiness or to his unhappiness. No single act in his whole existence is indifferent. Furthermore, each human being differs in his physical, mental, and emotional constitution and also in the circumstances by which he is surrounded from every other human being. Many acts therefore that are virtuous and tend to happiness in the case of one person are vicious and tend to unhappiness in the case of another person. Many acts also that are virtuous and tend to happiness in the case of one man at one time and under one set of circumstances are vicious and tend to unhappiness in the case of the same man at another time and under other circumstances. 3. To know what actions are virtuous and what vicious, in other words, to know what actions tend on the whole to happiness and what to unhappiness in the case of each and every man in each and all the conditions in which they may severally be placed is the profoundest and most complex study to which the greatest human mind has ever been or can be directed. It is nevertheless the constant study to which each and every man, the humblest in intellect as well as the greatest, is necessarily driven by the desires and necessities of his own existence. It is also the study in which each and every person from his cradle to his grave must necessarily form his own conclusions, because no one else knows or feels or can know or feel as he knows and feels the desires and necessities, the hopes and fears and impulses of his own nature or the pressure of his own circumstances. 4. It is not often possible to say of those acts that are called vices that they really are vices except in degree. That is, it is difficult to say of any actions or courses of actions that are called vices that they really would have been vices if they had stopped short of a certain point. The question of virtue or vice therefore in all such cases is a question of quantity and degree, not of the intrinsic character of any single act by itself. This fact adds to the difficulty not to say the impossibility of any ones except each individual for himself drawing any accurate line or anything like any accurate line between virtue and vice. That is, of telling where virtue ends and vice begins. And this is another reason why this whole question of virtue and vice should be left for each person to settle for himself. 5. Vices are usually pleasurable at least for the time being and often do not disclose themselves as vices by their effects until after they have been practiced for many years, perhaps for a lifetime. To many, perhaps most of those who practice them, they do not disclose themselves as vices at all during life. Virtues, on the other hand, often appear so harsh and rugged they require the sacrifice of so much present happiness at least, and the results which alone prove them to be virtues are often so distant and obscure, in fact so absolutely invisible to the minds of many, especially of the young, that from the very nature of things there can be no universal or even general knowledge that they are virtues. In truth, the studies of profound philosophers have been expended, if not wholly in vain, certainly with very small results, in efforts to draw the lines between the virtues and the vices. If then it be so difficult, so nearly impossible in most cases to determine what is and what is not vice, and especially if it be so difficult in nearly all cases to determine where virtue ends and vice begins, and if these questions which no one can really and truly determine for anybody but himself are not to be left free and open for experiment by all, each person is deprived of the highest of all his rights as a human being, to it, his right to inquire, investigate, reason, try experiments, judge and ascertain for himself what is to him virtue and what is to him vice. In other words, what on the whole conduces to his happiness and what on the whole conduces to his unhappiness. If this great right is not to be left free and open to all, then each man's whole right as a reasoning human being to liberty and the pursuit of happiness is denied him. This has been Individualism a Reader, edited by George H. Smith and Marilyn Moore, narrated by James Foster. Copyright 2015 by the Cato Institute, Production Copyright 2015 by the Cato Institute.