על החוקים לפרטיהם, ספר ג כ״טOn the Special Laws, Book III 29
א׳
1[153] Another excellent ordinance is that fathers should not die for their sons nor sons for their parents, but each person who has committed deeds worthy of death should suffer it alone and in his own person. This order has in view those who either set violence before justice or are strongly influenced by family affection.
ב׳
2[154] These last in their excessive and overwhelming devotion will often be willing and glad to sacrifice their guiltless selves for the guilty and die in their stead. They count it a great gain to be spared from seeing, parents their children and sons their parents, undergoing a punishment which they feel will make their after-life intolerable and more painful than any death.
ג׳
3[155] To these we should answer “your devotion is mistimed and the mistimed deserves censure just as the rightly timed deserves praise. It is right indeed to shew friendship to those whose actions are worthy of friendship, but no evil-doer is a true friend. Those whom we call our kinsfolk or within the circle of kinsmen our friends are turned into aliens by their misconduct when they go astray; for agreement to practise justice and every virtue makes a closer kinship than that of blood, and he who abandons this enters his name in the list not only of strangers and foreigners but of mortal enemies.
ד׳
4[156] Why, then, under the false name of devotion do you assume to be all that is kind and humane and cloak the realities, your weakness and unmanliness? For unmanly is the nature you shew in letting compassion overcome your reason, only to commit a double wrong in trying to deliver the guilty from chastisement and in thinking it right that you should be punished in their stead when no blame at all has been cast upon you.”