Life & Wisdom Quote by William Godwin

A chill runs through Godwin's sentence because it yanks the Enlightenment promise of individual rights into the machinery of moral arithmetic. “No right to his life” is not a flourish; it’s a deliberate reversal of the liberal instinct that life and liberty are primary, inviolable claims against the crowd. In Godwin’s hands, they become conditional permissions, always subject to revocation when “duty” or “a greater evil” enters the room.

The specific intent is to defend an uncompromising version of consequentialist ethics: if the outcome demands sacrifice, the moral ledger can require it, even to the point of killing or imprisoning someone who resists. Godwin doesn’t merely permit coercion; he frames it as an obligation on “other men,” turning collective violence into a grim civic responsibility. The wording matters. “Indispensably necessary” pretends to be a narrow gate, but it’s also a rhetorical solvent: once necessity is invoked, almost any brutality can be laundered as prevention.

Context sharpens the edge. Writing in the shadow of the French Revolution and its arguments about terror, virtue, and public safety, Godwin is wrestling with what happens when rational reform meets social panic. He’s often remembered as an early anarchist skeptical of the state; that’s precisely why this passage stings. It exposes a tension in radical moral theory: even the anti-authoritarian can smuggle in an executioner, provided the justification is abstract enough. The subtext is a warning and a temptation at once: reason, unmoored from rights, can become a knife that always claims clean hands.