In his "Anarchical Fallacies"...

In his "Anarchical Fallacies", Bentham critically examined the French Declaration of the Rights of man and dubbed them as simple nonsense rhetorical nonsense, "nonsense upon stilts".6 Every just government, Bentham accordingly would have said, had he been writing the American Declaration of Independence, deprives its authority not from the consent of the governed but from the utility of its acts in promoting the happiness of its subjects.

The happiness of the body politic consists in promoting security, substance, abundance and equality and these are the objects which legislator should keep in view while enacting a particular piece of legislation. John Stuart Mill agreed generally with Bentham's doctrine but he slightly modified it and included qualitative pleasure along with quantitative one.

He also insisted that the utilitarian doctrine of happiness was altruistic rather than egoistic, since its ideal was the happiness of all concerned. Within the utilitarians, one of the chief issues of legal philosophy to which Mill suggested an approach different from that of Bentham was the significance that should be attributed to the concept of justice. Bentham had spoken of justice in a deprecatory fashion and had subordinated it completely to the dictates of utility.

At one place he observed: "Sometimes in order the better to conceal the cheat (from their own eyes doubtless as well as from others) they set up a phantom of their own, which they call 'Justice': whose dictates are to modify (which being explained means to oppose) the dictates of benevolence.

But justice in the only sense in which it has a meaning, is an imaginary personage feigned for the convenience of discourse, whose dictates are the dictates of utility applied to certain particular cases." 7 Whereas Mill, although taking the position that the standard of justice should be grounded on utility, believed that the origin of the sense of justice must be sought in two sentiments other than utility namely, the impulse of self defense and feeling of sympathy.8 Differently expressed the feeling of justice is the urge to retaliate for a wrong, placed on a generalized basis.9 This feeling rebels against an injury, not solely for personal reasons, but also because it hurts other members of society with whom we sympathize and identify ourselves.