John Locke And John Stuart Mill

In the era of enlightenment, people started to promote new idea and use of reason in order to overthrow the superstition and conservativeness towards the catholic church (Zafirovski, 2011). In addition, “philosophes” were existed and proposed some new idea in challenging the corrupted political system and the awareness of people’s liberty and human rights rise at that time (Outram, 2006). The philosophes believed that the political and ethical theories could bring the society to be emancipated. John Locke, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill proposed a series of new ideas which were influential and lead to the improvement of the society. Also, these ideas were spread worldwide and it shaped the modern society. Human nature refers to the

John Locke’s “social contract” theory and his idea towards the rule of laws built up the fundamental of judicial independence and regulated the relationship between majority people and government until now (Kendall, 1965). John Locke proposed “social contract” in the era of Enlightenment, which stated that government and citizens only have the relationship of exchanging legitimacy and right fairly and they are not superior to each other (Klosko, 2013). It coordinated the fundamental of constitutional government in modern world as it emphasized the importance of restricting the power of government while government is responsible for securing natural rights such as the right to liberty of citizen under liberalism. For instance, it was advocated in United States Declaration of Independence in 1777 (Becker, 1992) and this idea was widely used in constitution of nations for regulating the power and duties of government. “POLITICAL LOCKE” Moreover, John Locke created the prototype of separation of powers, a popular idea in democratic countries. John Locke advocated that executive and legislative should be separated and independent in avoiding the country fall into dictatorship (Lessnoff, 1990). In democratic countries, parliament and government was usually being separated in order to confine each other. In addition, Mill also proposed” Social Liberty”, the ruler should not have too much authority in avoiding the ruler use his

In their perspective, the utility and happiness it brought was the measurement for judging whether an action is moral or not. Bentham classified 12 kinds pains and 14 kinds of pleasures respectively (Bentham, Hart, & Burns, 1970). Also, Bentham identified seven criteria for calculating pain and pleasure while the quantity of pleasure and pain are able to be calculate but there is no difference in quality. Moreover, they emphasized consequentialism and it was inseparable with utilitarianism (Burns, 2005). It required people to classify the pleasure brought of each action and consequentialism declined people to label others as immoral with no significant evident. In other words, people who classify other’s action as immoral have to figure out who’s pain will be affected through the actions. For Mill, he also advocated the utilitarianism that nothing is immoral based the utility it brought unless it restricted and related to other’s self-interest.
In modern context, the controversy of homosexual marriage exactly suits the principle of consequentialism as the legislation increase the happiness for the Gays, adopted Children while it may threaten the interest of their opponents (Barry, 2013) . Also, it has not cause harm to other people even they are simply acting in a way their opponent does not like. According to Mill’s “harm principle”, the opponents should not use either the law or moral