ABSTRACT
J.S.Mill argues, in chapter V of his classic essay on utilitarianism, that justice is a name for certain moral requirements, which, regarded collectively, stand higher in the scale of social utility, and are therefore of more paramount obligation, than any others…’ 1 He associates social utilities of this higher kind with ‘security, to every one’s feelings, the most vital of all interests’. 2 Security emanates from a network of individual rights and correlative obligations assigned by social rules, including laws, customs, and common dictates of conscience. By distributing and sanctioning rights to things deemed essential to the right-holder’s welfare, such rules create a degree of general security of expectations for those essentials. But different codes of rules will evidently give rise to different degrees of general security, depending on the content of rights, how broadly rights are extended, whether different persons’ rights are equal, and so on. 3 To maximise general security, Mill seems to suggest, an ideal code is needed which gives equal rights to all (excluding children, mental defectives, and the like), and which also fosters substantial material equality. 4 That ideal code is not yet feasible for actual societies, however, for want of the requisite mass education if for no other reason, and there is no prospect of remedying existing intellectual and moral disabilities overnight, through some form of revolution. In the meantime, general security is so valuable that society must establish and require compliance with some non-ideal code of justice which, given the constraints of the present imperfect state of education, is an optimal feasible code. By doing so, society provides ‘the very groundwork of our existence’:
[S]ecurity no human being can possibly do without; on it we depend for all our immunity from evil, and for the whole value of all and every good, beyond the passing moment; since nothing but the gratification of the instant could be of any worth to us, if we could be deprived of everything the next instant by whoever was momentarily stronger than ourselves… [Security] cannot be had, unless the machinery for providing it is kept unintermittedly in active play. Our notion, therefore, of the claim we have on our fellow-creatures to join in making safe for us the very groundwork of our existence, gathers feelings around it so much more intense than those concerned in any of the more common cases of utility, that the difference of degree (as is often the case in psychology) becomes a real difference in kind. The claim assumes that character of absoluteness, that apparent infinity, and incommensurability with other considerations, which constitute the distinction between the feeling of right and wrong and that of ordinary expediency and inexpediency. 5
