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John Stuart Mill, one of the best known utilitarian writers of the 19th century, understood that many people believed that utilitarianism was incompatible with strong individual rights and a strong defense of justice. In Utilitarianism he wrote that at times "people find it difficult to see in justice only a particular kind or branch of general utility, and think that its superior binding force requires a totally different origin." (Utilitarianism, p. 53) Mill argued that this view was mistaken. He held that utilitarianism could embrace both strong individual rights and rigorous rules of justice.

Justice implies something which it is not only right to do, and wrong not to do, but which some individual person can claim from us as his moral right." (J. S. Mill, Utilitarianism, The Liberal Arts Press, Inc, p. 62)

When we call anything a person's right, we mean that he has a valid claim on society to protect him in the possession of it, wither by the force of law or by that of education and opinion. If he has what we consider a sufficient claim, on whatever account, to have something guaranteed to him by society, we say that he has a right to it. If we desire to prove that anything does not belong to him by right, we think this done as soon as it is admitted that society ought not to take measures for securing it to him, but should leave him to chance or to his own exertions....

To have a right, then, is, I conceive, to have something which society ought to defend me in the possession of. If the objector goes on to ask why it ought, I can give him no other reason than general utility. If that expression does not seem to convey a sufficient feeling of the strength of the obligation, nor to account for the peculiar energy of the feeling, it is because there goes to the composition of the sentiment, not a rational only but also an animal element -- the thirst for retaliation; and this thirst derives its intensity, as well as its moral justification, from the extraordinarily important and impressive kind of utility which is concerned. The interest involved is that of security, to everyone's feelings the most vital of all interests....Our notion, therefore, of the claim we have on our fellow creatures to join in making safe for us the very groundwork of our existence gathers feelings around it so much more intense than those concerned in any of the more common cases of utility that the difference in degree (as is often the case in psychology) becomes a real difference in kind. The claim assumes that character of absoluteness, that apparent infinity and incommensurability with all other considerations which constitute the distinction between the feeling of right and wrong and that of ordinary expediency and inexpediency.... (Utilitarianism, p. 66)

While I dispute the pretensions of any theory which sets up an imaginary standard of justice not grounded on utility, I account the justice which is grounded on utility to be the chief part, and incomparably the most sacred and binding part, of all morality. Justice is a name for certain classes of moral rules which concern the essentials of human well-being more nearly, and are therefore of more absolute obligation, than any other rules for the guidance of life; and the notion which we have found to be of the essence of the idea of justice -- that of a right residing in an individual -- implies and testifies to this more binding obligation. (Utilitarianism, p. 73)

Justice remains the appropriate name for certain social utilities which are vastly more important, and therefore more absolute and imperative, than any others are as a class (though not more so than others may be in particular cases); and which, therefore, ought to be, as well as naturally are, guarded by a sentiment, not only different in degree, but also in kind; distinguished from milder feeling which attaches to the mere idea of promotion human pleasure or convenience at once by the more definite nature of its commands and by the sterner character of its sanctions." (Utilitarianism, p. 79)