Natural Rights and Utilitarianism: A Primer

[Valin]

Ricochet

Frank Soto

6/1/13

 

Recently during The Hemingways Podcast #12, a discussion broke out in relation to utilitarian ethics. Mollie admitted to being largely unaware of the existence of an alternative idea to natural rights. I imagine she is hardly alone. Natural rights are widely accepted the world over.

 

To be clear, utilitarianism is a broader theory of ethics, while natural rights refers to rights which cannot be nullified by any social contract. So they only conflict when we are talking about the rights of life, liberty and property. Not when we address lawmaking in a broader sense.

 

Natural rights give good government a starting point as to how its laws should be structured, but utilitarianism proposes a system by which all laws could be determined.

 

So why are the two in conflict, and why does it matter?

 

We must begin by doing a poor job of defining both concepts, due to time and attention span constraints.

 

 

(Snip)