ABSTRACT
Although John Stuart Mill never directly referenced her work, he was surely influenced by Wollstonecraft’s political theory—especially her thinking on the relationship of rights to justice. Both moral rights and the legal rights that are based on them are human rights for Wollstonecraft and Mill, because both types of rights are grounded upon their respective conceptions of the human being as a moral being. Although Wollstonecraft takes a theological and metaphysical approach and Mill a secular and non-metaphysical one, they both offer robust normative accounts of the human being’s organic and ethical development through freedom and rights. This is the most important commonality in their theories of universal human rights: their joint grounding of rights claims on normatively rich accounts of what it means to be human. Their respective conceptions of humanity gave them strong normative standards by which they could judge the defects of culture and law with regard to the rights of humans, and subsequently advocate for reform that would advance justice for each and all through the equal provision of rights.
