Utilitarianism is on the detensive...

Utilitarianism is on the detensive, if not on the run, in the face of theories of justice which in many ways resemble the doctrine of unalienable rights of man, and there are important conceptual connections between law and morality obscured by the positivistic tradition.”29 (C) (iii) - Ronald Dworkin’s Notion of Justice For both Rawls and Nozick, there is clear relationship between justice and rights, but it is Ronald Dworkin who can be said most clearly to ground justice in rights.

To Dworkin rights are “trumps”. They are grounded in a principle of equal concern and respect, so for a Judge to make a mistake about a legal right is “a matter of injustice.” Further, the whole institution of rights rests on the convictin that “the invasion of relatively important right is a grave injustice.

Dworkin sees rights as safeguards inserted into political and legal morality to prevent the conception of the equalitarian character of welfarist calculations by the introduction of external preferences.30 Utilitarianism, Dworkin argues assigns critical weight to external preferences: it is accordingly not equalitarian since it will not respect the right of every one to be treated with equal concern…