ABSTRACT
According to a conventional view, no project could be more hopelessly misconceived than the enterprise of attempting a utilitarian derivation of fundamental rights. We are all familiar — too familiar, perhaps — with the arguments that support this conventional view, but let us review them anyway. We may begin by recalling that, whereas the defining value of utilitarianism — pleasure, happiness, or welfare — contains nomention of the dignity or autonomy of human beings, it is this value which utilitarianism in all its standard forms invokes as the criterion of right action. Worse, in so far as utilitarian policy must have as its goal the maximization of welfare conceived as an aggregate summed over the utilities of everyone affected, legal and political utilitarianism seems bound to have a collectivist bias, trading on the dangerous fiction of a social entity and ignoring the distinctness of separate selves with their several incommensurable claims.
