ABSTRACT
The issue of justification is really a matter of addressing a why question: Why do I have some particular right, or any rights at all, for that matter? This chapter addresses this question and focuses on several kinds of answers to it. Without question, rights are intimately related to the issue of justice, as John Stuart Mill argues. Of course, one does not need to endorse utilitarianism or a utilitarian justification of rights in order to embrace this relationship between rights and justice. A view, Mill's utilitarian perspective, certainly emphasizes social factors, such as what regulations of behavior promote the greatest good, and so is 'subjective'; at the same time, however, it provides a means of going beyond simple subjective preferences and decisions by having a clear, 'objective' means to determine whether rights are justified. The author suggests that the two positions are compatible and, indeed, that moral relativism provides the only plausible foundation for a theory of natural rights.
