Justice and virtue also, for Vico, form a unity, since that power of truth, or human reason, which is virtue in so far as it struggles with selfishness, is also justice in so far as it directs or equates utilities. This implies that Vico does not distinguish, at least in the systematic exposition of the _Diritto universale,_ between law and morality: a distinction which indeed received little emphasis in the doctrine of natural rights, and is barely indicated in Grotius, for instance, as one between a greater and less degree of morality. Vico's doctrine of punishment is also purely moral, and deduced from the ethical concept of remorse. It is inflicted, he says, by the law, and is nothing but a social reinforcement of the individual conscience, in the case where the offender does not himself expiate his crime by means of remorse and internal punishment.
But the more the problem of the relation between law and morality is absent in Vico's theoretical formulation and systematic treatment, the more present it is in his particular observations; indeed it may be said to pervade the whole of the New Science. Nor could it be otherwise, seeing that this relation refers to the distinction between the moral will and the inferior or earlier forms of will; and we know that all Vico's tendencies were towards exploring the lower and obscure region of the mind, both cognitive and practical, in the sphere alike of imagination, will and passion.
He always realised the supreme importance of the passions; and if he could not approve of giving them the upper hand, if he always considered the Epicurean morality a morality "of idlers shut up in their pleasure-gardens," he did not at all approve of excessively severe moralities such as that of the Stoics, which was no less than the other a morality of "solitaries," not one for men living in a state. Stoicism certainly preaches an eternal and immutable justice, and makes honour the criterion of human action; but it does violence to human nature, dehumanises it, annuls it and drives it to despair by pretending that it is quite insensible to the passions, by ignoring the utility and necessity of the bodily nature, by inculcating that rule--a rule "harder than iron"--that sins are all equal and that he who strikes a slave is as guilty as he who kills his father. The same doubts must have been aroused in Vico's mind by Jansenism, as he complains that "out of hatred of probability, Christian morality in France is becoming rigidified." We ought to follow not these solitary philosophers but rather those political ones, especially the Platonic type, which recognises that the passions should be not eradicated but moderated and "converted into human virtues." Thus out of cruelty, avarice and ambition, the three universal faults of mankind, Providence elicits the warrior, the merchant and the judge; the bravery, wealth and wisdom of states. From these three failings, which would destroy mankind on the earth, civil prosperity is formed.