Abstract

The following theses make up our philosophical conception of moral rights: Moral rights can be had . Moral rights protect . Moral rights expedite moral argument . ;The possession thesis raises the question: "What is the source of moral rights?" The received view is that nature is the source of moral rights. I argue that this view creates tension between the possession and protection theses, assuming that moral rights protect right-holders from Hobbesian agents who act for a mixture of moral and prudential reasons. This tension renders our philosophical conception of moral rights incoherent. I resolve this tension by embracing a quasi-positivistic account of the source of moral rights that takes legal practices to account partly for their source. This move, in addition to renouncing the moral argument thesis , affords us a fully coherent conception of moral rights