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The foregoing discussion has indicated the answer to the question, Is it possible or not for a man to commit injustice against himself? (1) One class of just actions consists of those acts, in accordance with any virtue, which are ordained by law.1 For instance, the law does not sanction suicide (and what2 it does not expressly sanction, it forbids).

1 The argument seems to be, that suicide does not prove the possibility of a man's committing ‘injustice,’ in the wider sense of any illegal injury, against himself. Suicide is an act of injustice in this sense, since it is the voluntary infliction of bodily harm not in retaliation and therefore contrary to law; but it is an offense not against oneself but against the State, since it is punished as such.

2 Or perhaps ‘and any form of homicide that it does not expressly permit.’

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