A couple of posts back I made a claim that seems to have upset a few people, namely that Rights (as we generally use the term) are legal constructs, not something inherent in nature, even though we talk about them as if they were. One criticism, quite correctly, pointed out that one of the bases of the Enlightenment was a recognition that human rights emerged out of a clear understanding of Natural Law, and that civil law was necessarily grounded in that understanding.
True, that is how we formulate it. And it may well be that there is, somewhere, a fundamental natural basis on which we build our moral and legal houses. …