Derecho, Deber y Utilidad: de Bentham a Kant y de Mill a Aristóteles.

Abstract

This paper analyzes the attempts developed by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill to make converge on some of the main models of moral foundation: the ethics of happiness, like Aristotle’s one, or the very utilitarian ethics, the ethics of duty of Kantian roots and the ethics of rights. If we “reduce” first, the ethics of rights to the model of the ethics of duty, we greatly simplify the issue, and we could limit ourselves to compare the latter model with the ethics of happiness, which in turn should converge in the own ethics of utility. However, while recognizing its great interest, a complete convergence between alternative models proves to be impossible. Despite the efforts, mainly by John Stuart Mill, you cannot reach a full unification with the utilitarian approaches of Aristotle and Kant’s views. The prosecution of the utilitarian enterprise to struggle for theoretical unification within the dominion of the problem of moral foundation has a good current example in the work of Esperanza Guisán.