In John Stuart Mill´s design of rights there are two important features which show the fineness of this philosopher’s distinction, born in London in 1806, between rights and utilitarianism. “Both ideas –says the person in charge of the edition, Manuel Escamilla—coincide that rights are indissolubly linked to duties and justice, higher than law, is also subordinated to usefulness, the supreme morality criterion. We will analyse both ideas below. Bantham’s version of utilitarianism had, according to Mill, brought about a real moral advance for moral science. He had turned moral into an empiric science, and he had stated it on an objective foundation, different to the hidden arbitrariness of the metaphysical approaches. However, the utilitarian principle was too abstract, due to the exigencies of its own situation as supreme criterion for the right and the wrong, and at the beginning of the chain of causes and effects, even when it was later more clearly formulated as more happiness for more people.
He deals in about 300 pages with Jeremy Bantham’s attempt to eliminate the so-called “human rights” from the politic-juridical argumentation and how John Stuart Mill defended and revived them as a concept and a democratic instrument. At the same time, this book pays homage to Mill; in 2006 is the 200th anniversary of his birth.
According to teacher Escamilla, John Stuart Mill is one of those few persons who, because of their genius, the work that other qualified persons devoted to educate them and their own intellectual effort and dedication for all their lives, “have remained alive beyond the limitations imposed by physical nature. We still can talk to him; rectify our way in his company, when we are about reach his bicentenary.”
This book is the result of a “dialogue”, according to Manuel Escamilla, between John Stuart Mill and a group of members of the department of Law Philosophy of Granada who decided to create a research project on his work, as a continuation of another project, more generic, previously developed by this group on utilitarianism.
Reference:
Prof. Manuel Escamilla Castillo
Department of Law Philosophy. University of Granada.
Phone number: 958 248 583.
E-mail: escamilla@goliat.ugr.es
