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I want to live within a moral and a legal system that includes rights, but I'm not sure what sort of justification or foundations are available. I don't think there is a conceptual proof that people have rights. In other words, I don't think we can derive rights from the analysis of moral concepts or that we are guilty of a contradiction if we deny that people have moral rights. And I don't think that we can discover that people have rights in the same way that we can discover that they have lungs. But maybe there is something else that is quite useful in a moral argument.

John Stuart Mill once wrote that there was no proof for the principle of utility, but there were considerations "capable of determining the intellect either to give or withhold its assent." I have always wondered what he meant by that remark; but it seems to me that it may apply here. There may be no proof that individuals have natural moral rights, but there may be considerations that would persuade most people to ascribe rights to all.

Notice my choice of language. I don't think that we discover that people have rights. I think that we decide to ascribe rights to people. Rights are human creations. The question, then, is whether there are good reasons to create and ascribe them. I think there are.