Utilitarian logic made granting rights to colonised peoples seem contrary to utility.

Evidence

Following in the utilitarian tradition of Jeremy Bentham, for whom natural rights were ‘nonsense upon stilts’, Mill argued that rights are simply claims that a society should protect in the interests of general utility. In the colonies, there was little utility in granting rights to those who lacked the pre-requisite for liberty: the capacity to improve themselves through reasoned discussion. Rather, he believed it was in the interest of all humanity that the Empire guide the colonised to civilisation, just as a parent guides a child into adulthood. He therefore demarcated those who were ready for rights from those who required a ‘vigorous despotism’ to lead them to a higher level of civilisation. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 245

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies the utilitarian grounding for denying rights: rights justified only by general utility, so those deemed incapable of reasoned improvement get none.
• XREF: Parallels the reader’s reading on neoliberalism: debates about whether economic rights should be conditional on ‘readiness’ echo this conditional-rights logic.