Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?: Summary & Key Insights

The first set of ideas we examine is utilitarianism, developed most notably by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. Bentham proposed a radical simplicity: justice means maximizing happiness—the greatest good for the greatest number. Every pleasure and pain, he said, can be measured and compared. Policy, morality, even punishment should be judged by the aggregate happiness they produce.

This philosophy has a democratic allure. It disregards privilege and rank and reduces moral reasoning to one simple metric: utility. Yet Bentham’s view also troubles us. If the happiness of the many outweighs the suffering of a few, does justice permit punishing an innocent man to prevent riots? Does it justify trading the dignity of one for the comfort of others? These questions expose moral intuitions that resist purely utilitarian calculation.

Mill refined Bentham’s theory to accommodate the quality of pleasures, insisting that moral worth lies not only in quantity but also in dignity—that higher pleasures of the mind and spirit count more than mere sensual satisfaction. His version protects personal liberty against tyranny of the majority. Happiness, for Mill, requires freedom of conscience and self-development.

Through these reflections, I invite you to see that utilitarian reasoning shapes much of our public life, from cost-benefit analyses of policy to debates about climate, health, and war. Yet it cannot tell the whole story, for justice cannot be measured solely by the arithmetic of pleasure. It must also reckon with rights, dignity, and reasons deeper than happiness.

Now we turn to libertarianism, which champions the freedom of the individual against the encroachments of the state. Robert Nozick’s 'Anarchy, State, and Utopia' presents the boldest version of this view. Taxes for redistributive purposes, he argues, amount to forced labor. To compel someone to use their earnings for others’ welfare violates their right to choose how to live.

The moral claim here is straightforward and powerful: individuals own themselves. From that right of self-ownership flow property, contract, and consent—the pillars of libertarian justice. If every person is free to dispose of his or her property without coercion, justice requires that the state do no more than prevent force, fraud, or theft.

Yet real life constantly tests this ideal. Should we allow unlimited freedom to sell body parts or pollute the environment? Does the principle of consent fully justify all market exchanges, even those born from desperation or inequality? Libertarian justice’s beauty lies in its purity, but its challenge lies in its blindness to civic ties and shared destinies. Nozick’s vision, I suggest, reminds us of the moral weight of freedom but also of the need to question what freedom is for—whether justice can mean more than the right to do as one pleases.