Abstract

This chapter introduces the project of this book, the consequentialist project for human rights, historically by relating it to J. S. Mill’s consequentialist project for autonomy rights and the early Rawls’s consequentialist project for liberal rights. The project is to identify a consequentialist principle of moral improvement, the main principle, to explain why it is superior to other nonconsequentialist principles, and to use it to explain why government guarantees of fourteen robust, inalienable human rights would be a moral improvement in any society anywhere on earth.