 Though there are important points of contact between Smith’s account of justice and Hume’s, the differences are considerable, chief of them being the fact that Hume grounds our approval of justice on our recognition of its utility, and Smith does not. We do sometimes take it into account in coming to a judgment, but more often than not it is something of a quite different nature that wells up in us: “All men, even the most stupid and unthinking, abhor fraud, perfidy, and injustice, and delight to see them punished. But few men have reflected upon the necessity of justice to the existence of society, how obvious soever that necessity may appear to be” (Smith 1790, p. 89). There are a few cases where utility is plainly involved in our judgment, but they are few, and they are in a distinct psychological class. Smith instances the sentinel who fell asleep while on watch and was executed because such carelessness might endanger the whole army. Smith’s comment is: “When the preservation of an individual is inconsistent with the safety of a multitude, nothing can be more just than that the many should be preferred to the one. Yet this punishment, how necessary soever, always appears to be excessively severe. The natural atrocity of the crime seems to be so little, and the punishment so great, that it is with great difficulty that our heart can reconcile itself to it” (Smith 1790, p. 90). And our reaction in this kind of case is to be contrasted with our reaction to the punishment of ‘an ungrateful murderer or parricide’, where we applaud the punishment with ardour and would be enraged and disappointed if the murderer escaped punishment. These very different reactions demonstrate that our approval of punishment in the one case and in the other are founded on very different principles.