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The claim that there are natural rights, which exist before or outside of any ordered civil society and apart from any positively legal expression, has long been controversial. There is a tradition of scepticism about such rights, stretching at least from the late eighteenth century to the present day. This opening chapter expounds four eminent expressions of this ‘Sceptical Tradition’ in the thought of Edmund Burke, Jeremy Bentham, David Ritchie, and Onora O’Neill. It concludes by distilling the tradition’ into a set of objections to natural rights-talk: its abstract character, which makes it impossible to evaluate and encourages political recklessness; its inflated rhetoric, which overlooks the moral importance of circumstances, especially feasibility; and its confusion of natural morality with legality. The subsequent four chapters then proceed to test these objections against natural rights-talk, first, in the pre-modern period (Chapter 2), second in the modern period (Chapter 3), third in modern Roman Catholic thought (Chapter 4), and finally as it comes from the pens of a selection of contemporary defenders (Chapter 5).

This chapter explores the life and thought of John Stuart Mill’s father, James Mill. It seeks to unravel his journey from pursuing the calling of an ordained Christian minister in the Church of Scotland to parting ways with the Christian faith altogether. It will also seek to understand James Mill’s mature critique of religion, as well as that of his friend the Utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, the author of several works critical of traditional Christianity. The unhappy marriage of John Stuart Mill’s parents is presented as a vital background for understanding his future choices and convictions. The Christian identity of his mother and siblings are also presented.

This chapter presents Mill’s precocious learning as a child—he famously was reading Greek at the age of three—as well as his father’s and Jeremy Bentham’s interest in shaping the boy in the light of their theories and beliefs. It traces how much religious education Mill actually did receive, and what books he read that helped to form his views on religion and Christianity. Despite Alexander Bain’s claim to the contrary, Mill read theology throughout his life. He spoke approvingly of the religious works of a range of authors, especially liberal Anglicans such as F. D. Maurice, Charles Kingsley, Florence Nightingale, and Baden Powell, but also the Quaker John Woolman and even the Roman Catholic W. G. Ward. This chapter also argues that Mill lacked a devotional sense.

The focus of this chapter is on the mature Mill and Utilitarianism, not least his 1861 treatise of that name which attempted to offer a broader, more defensible version of the Benthamite legacy. It uncovers the Christian Utilitarianism of William Paley and explores Mill’s own claim that Utilitarianism was the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth. This chapter then goes on to discuss the Catholic faith and commitment to the Mass of Mill’s stepdaughter and closest companion and collaborator during the last fifteen years of his life, Helen Taylor, as well as the devout Christianity of his stepson, Algernon, whom Mill even had write about a church father for the Westminster Review.

Scholars of biblical law have long seen the inconsistencies among the law corpora of the Pentateuch as signs of schools and communities in conflict. This chapter offers an introductory foundation for the following five chapters on biblical and ancient Near Eastern law. It demonstrates that the dominant approach to the critical study of biblical law—that is, as statutory law—is based on anachronistic, nineteenth-century notions of how law works and how legal texts are formulated. The chapter traces the history of legal thought in that century, and how it shaped (a better term might be distorted) how we view the ancient legal texts of the Bible and the Near East, and recovers premodern understandings of how law works and how legal texts are to be read in accordance with common-law jurisprudence.