According to Proudhon the supreme law for us is justice.

What is justice? "Justice is respect, spontaneously felt and mutually guaranteed, for human dignity, in whatever person and under whatever circumstances we find it compromised, and to whatever risk its defence may expose us."[127]

"I ought to respect my neighbor, and make others respect him, as myself; such is the law of my conscience. In consideration of what do I owe him this respect? In consideration of his strength, his talent, his wealth? No, what chance gives is not what makes the human person worthy of respect. In consideration of the respect which he in turn pays to me? No, justice assumes reciprocity of respect, but does not wait for it. It asserts and wills respect for human dignity even in an enemy, which causes the existence of laws of war; even in the murderer whom we kill as having fallen from his manhood, which causes the existence of penal laws. It is not the gifts of nature or the advantages of fortune that make me respect my neighbor; it is not his ox, his ass, or his maid-servant, as the decalogue says; it is not even the welfare that he owes to me as I owe mine to him; it is his manhood."[128]

"Justice is at once a reality and an idea."[129] "Justice is a faculty of the soul, the foremost of all, that which constitutes a social being. But it is more than a faculty; it is an idea, it indicates a relation, an equation. As a faculty it may be developed; this development is what constitutes the education of humanity. As an equation it presents nothing antinomic; it is absolute and immutable like every law, and, like every law, very intelligible."[130]

Justice is for us the supreme law. "Justice is the inviolable yardstick of all human actions."[131] "By it the facts of social life, by nature indeterminate and contradictory, become susceptible of definition and arrangement."[132]

"Justice is the central star which governs societies, the pole about which the political world revolves, the principle and rule of all transactions. Nothing is done among men that is not in the name of right; nothing without invoking justice. Justice is not the work of the law; on the contrary, the law is never anything but a declaration and application of what is just."[132] "Suppose a society where justice is outranked, however little, by another principle, say religion; or in which certain individuals are regarded more highly, by however little, than others; I say that, justice being virtually annulled, it is inevitable that the society will perish sooner or later.[133]

"It is the privilege of justice that the faith which it inspires is unshakable, and that it cannot be dogmatically denied or rejected. All peoples invoke it; reasons of State, even while they violate it, profess to be based on it; religion exists only for it; skepticism dissembles before it; irony has power only in its name; crime and hypocrisy do it homage. [If liberty is not an empty phrase, it acts only in the service of right; even when it rebels against right, at bottom it does not curse it.]"[134] "All the most rational teachings of human wisdom about justice are summed up in this famous adage: Do to others what you would have done to you; Do not to others what you would not have done to you."[135]