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I'm not so sure that rights are an essential part of a moral system. They may be essential to any moral system that you would accept. But even in the western tradition, there was little or no talk of individual rights until the last few hundred years. Plato doesn't talk of rights. Neither does Aristotle or Aquinas.

And trust me, as an anthropology student, the whole notion of individual rights as the core of a moral system is rare outside the modern western world. More traditional societies have never heard of such a thing. They conceptualize morals differently.

Some moral theories stress virtue or the good, with little or no discussion of rights in the modern sense.

On political level, my point is that we Americans may be intellectually locked into using the language of rights in a way that prevents us from seeing situations and problems in other ways. For example, when we want to stop the mistreatment of animals, we start saying that animals have rights. We don’t know how else to conceptualize the problem.

Maybe what we need is to free ourselves from a conceptual scheme built around the concept of individual rights so that we can think about other possibilities?