in meta ethics what one tries to do is think about what makes the sorts of
claims such as the foundational claims of liberalism true in the in the liberal
tradition for instance there are there are really two central strands one is is
personified by John Locke that's a natural rights tradition and that finds
that finds these rights endowed to us by our creators or so either given to us by
God or by some sort of fact about about human nature it's like the slightly
different tradition and then John Stuart Mill on the other hand who thinks that
who puts the who who defends many of the same sorts of rights but defends him on
fundamentally different grounds defends them as moral rights because he thinks
that they're the sorts of things that need to be protected in order for people
to flourish so it's a utilitarian argument in the sense that the ultimate
value here is happiness or well-being but it's an indirect utilitarian
argument because it says that we shouldn't just evaluate individual
actions by trying to estimate their effect in isolation but rather we should
think about the most important moral rules for the governance of society that
will be particularly conducive to human happiness and for Mill he thought that
those rules enshrined the kinds of rights that classical liberals focus on
freedom of conscience freedom of association rule of law autonomy of your
mind and body another way of viewing the difference between a Lockean form of
liberalism and a million form of liberalism is about whether it whether
the it holds that certain sorts of actions are inherently right or
inherently wrong Locke thought something like that
he thought that somehow or other we could
nationally determined the rightness are wrong in us the inherent rightness or
wrongness of certain sorts of of actions Kant was another person who found that
for Mill he thought that what makes actions right or wrong ultimately is
their consequences for human happiness at the same time though he thought that
there was a crucial role for rules for moral rules and that the rightness on
wrongness of actions issues from whether or not they're in accordance with the
best set of moral rules were the best set of moral rules are the ones that
whose adoption is going to be maximally conducive to have yes a central medical
question is our certain sorts of actions inherently right or wrong or are they
right or wrong in virtue of their consequences and and what I'm suggesting
in Mills REE was somewhere in between there because he thinks foundationally
it's the good it's it's happiness that's the ultimate value but he also sees
moral rules not just as being heuristics rules of thumb things that we can apply
but then throw away under pressure to the contrary he thinks that they
generate real obligations even in even in extraordinary circumstances where it
seems like say violating someone's freedom of speech will be better in
terms of its consequences because because of the of political
contingencies of the moment what what Mill understood was the stability of
having having moral rules that we respect in a very stringent way maybe
not in catastrophe but in although an ordinary conducts we really need to
guard against people wanting to make accept
we need to guard against people thinking especially about that their that their
own case is different from the general case because we're all we're all biased
we're all biased in favor of ourselves and those we love and the projects that
we believe in and one of the things that we have to do be able to do in order to
live in society with with each other is play by the same rules and implement
rules that we can agree are our worth are worth playing by even when we think
that we can we can see that breaking one on on an occasion would would lead to
battle results