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I'm not a utilitarian either. I agree with Ann that human welfare is important, but I worry about the kinds of problems that Ayesha mentioned. For example, Rawls's point, that utilitarianism does not take seriously the distinction between persons, seems fatal to me.

But let me go back to what I was saying before. I do not think that we discover that people have rights. I think that we ascribe rights to people by making a moral decision, and so the big question is whether there are good reasons to do so. One philosopher, Gregory Vlastos, argued years ago that people have natural rights (i.e., rights that do not depend on government) because they have equal intrinsic worth or value. Here's a quote from Vlastos:

[W]e recognize something which is highly and equally valuable in all persons, but has nothing to do with their merit, and constitutes the ground of their equal rights....In all cases where human beings are capable of enjoying the same goods, we feel that the intrinsic value of their enjoyment is the same. In just this sense we hold that (1)  one man's well-being is as valuable as any other's. And there is a parallel difference in our feeling for freedom....For us (2) one man's freedom is as valuable as any other's. [Gregory Vlastos, Justice and Equality" in Social Justice, ed. by Richard Brandt, p. 50-51.]