In Defense of Moral Rights:

Abstract

In this paper I would like to defend, against its critics, the possibility of a rights-based normative theory of ethics, starting from the view that to answer today’s moral questions we cannot avoid to confront with the question of what rights and, peculiarly, what moral rights should be granted to people, where for ‘moral rights’, I mean ‘rights which are not the product of community legislation or social practice, which persist even in the face of contrary legislation or practice and which prescribe the boundary beyond which neither individuals nor the community may go in pursuit of their overall ends’ (1).