Over the past fifty years or so, society’s tendency to arbitrate moral issues through the framework of rights has increased notably. Milestones of this phenomenal rise have been various more or less binding declarations and conventions on rights issued by such diverse institutions as the United Nations, the EU and, more recently, the UK parliament. This dominance has been so great that the very idea of questioning the notion of rights can seem blasphemous, as if it were the questioning of morality itself.

Surely, human rights are a sign of moral progress and without this conquest we would be stuck in the Middle Ages? Leaving aside the fact that the Middle Ages gave us Dante while modernity has given us Damien Hirst, the problem lies elsewhere.

The problem lies with the popularity that the vocabulary of rights has enjoyed over past decades, resulting in the almost total colonization of our whole moral discourse. Just think of the fact that we have to postulate the existence of a contract bestowing rights upon other species in order to say that we ought to treat animals decently. It seems impossible nowadays to make moral claims without invoking someone’s (or something’s) rights.

This brings us to the heart of the problem. Much confusion about rights stems from the fact that they perform two contrasting functions: on the one hand they are expected to provide answers to moral questions, while on the other they act as political solutions to intractable moral dilemmas.

As moral answers aspiring to universal validity, rights do not fare well. Beyond a very minimal set of basic rights, they are unable to assert themselves over the diversity of views that characterizes contemporary moral life. The innumerable conflicts of supposedly universal rights seem to prove this point. Rights of foetuses clash with those of women, rights of certain communities clash against those of the individuals in them, and so on. Moral dialogue is often reduced to an escalation of increasingly intolerant rights claims.

Arguably, the vast majority of rights are, in fact, political solutions. Every right protecting some freedom of choice attempts to secure the neutrality of the state and to place moral responsibility with the individual and her choice. Whether or not this neutrality is successfully achieved is of secondary importance. The fundamental point is that this type of rights might be a good criterion for legislation, but when it comes to moral life, they can provide no guidance. In Rawls’ famous phrase, they “neither assert nor deny”.

The conclusion is that we should start looking with renewed interest at other, older ways of thinking about ethics. Rights might be fine for denouncing torture or securing state neutrality in contentious cases, yet they fail spectacularly in answering the oldest question of morality: how one should lead one’s life. The astounding success of the language of rights has succeeded in eliminating talk of virtue, character, moral strength and weakness from our moral vocabulary. It is time to reclaim this heritage.

Tommaso Giordani is a freelance writer and translator