Mill's case for justice and rights suppose the utilitarian calculus in the long run works out as he says it will such that respecting people's rights is a way of making everybody better off in the long run is that the right reason is that the only reason to respect people? if the doctor goes in and yanks the organs from the healthy patient who came in for a checkup to save five lives there would be adverse effects in the long run eventually people would learn about this and would stop going in for checkups is it the right reason is the only reason that you as a doctor won't yanked the organs out of a healthy patient that you think well if I use him in this way in the long run more lives will be lost? or is there another reason having to do with intrinsic respect for the person as an individual and if that reason matters and it's not so clear that even Mill's utilitarianism can take account of it fully to examine these two worries or objections to Mill's defense we need to we need to push further we need to ask in the case of higher or worthier pleasures are there theories of the good life that can provide independent moral standards for the worth of pleasures? if so what do they look like? that's one question in the case of justice and rights if we suspected that Mill is implicitly leaning on notions of human dignity or respect for persons that are not, strictly speaking, utilitarian we need to look to see whether there are some stronger theories of rights that can explain the intuition which even Mill shares the intuition that the reason for respecting individuals and not using them goes beyond even utility in the long run. today we turn to one of those strong theories of rights strong theories of rights say individuals matter not just as instruments to be used for a larger social purpose or for the sake of maximizing utility individuals are separate beings with separate lives worthy of respect and so it's a mistake according to strong theories rights, it's a mistake to think about justice or law by just getting up preferences and values the strong rights theory we turn to today is libertarianism 