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This essay examines the relation between law and morality with respect to a particular concept – a right. In opposition to the view defended by Jeremy Bentham and, more recently, Raymond Frey and L. W. Sumner that only institutionally conferred rights are real rights, the argument here is that moral rights are common parts of the conceptual apparatus of most, if not all, people when they make moral and political judgments. The point is not simply that many of these rights are ones people feel ought to be legal rights (their appropriateness as legislation is an additional feature); rather, the point is that people recoil at the violation of these rights as moral rights. This defense of moral rights, which invokes moral principles to establish truth claims about rights that have nothing necessarily to do with human institutions, is not guilty of reinterpreting those noninstitutional principles as if they were special institutional rules.

Is happiness compatible with suffering? The answer is complicated. Nothing can protect us from tragedies that destroy what we cherish most, and thereby undermine happiness. Yet much suffering can be integrated into happy lives, depending significantly on our attitudes. As is often said, suffering can deepen joy and meaning. Not surprising, philosophical perspectives on the value of suffering in good lives both reflect and shape conceptions of happiness. Examples include John Dewey, Jeremy Bentham, and Arthur Schopenhauer.

This chapter reviews the book Henry Sidgwick: Eye of the Universe: An Intellectual Biography (2004), by Bart Schultz. If social good for all or most people is to be achieved, it will be because somehow or other the selfish decisions of many people combine to produce it. Such Utilitarian ideas, however, are but an amputated limb of the radical philosophy that once went by that name. For the three great British Utilitarians—Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Henry Sidgwick—the proper social goal was the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Sidgwick domesticated Utilitarianism and made it both academically and socially respectable, in the process smoothing its rough edges. Unlike Bentham and Mill, Sidgwick wanted badly to believe in conventional religion. He tried to prove the existence of a life after death scientifically, co-founding the Society for Psychical Research and devoting a great part of his later life to experiments that tested the claims of mediums, clairvoyants, and hypnotists. Sidgwick was also profoundly unconventional in matters of gender and sexuality.