LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Rights: People
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This metaphor of trumps leads naturally to the question of whether there is any right that has priority to absolutely all other normative considerations: whether there is an "ace of rights." Gewirth (1981) asserts that there is at least one such absolute right: the right of all persons not to be made the victim of a homicidal project. For such a right to be absolute it would have to trump every other consideration whatsoever: other rights, economic efficiency, saving lives, everything. Not all would agree with Gewirth that even this very powerful right overrides every conceivable normative concern. Some would think it might be justifiable to infringe even this right were this somehow necessary, for example, to prevent the deaths of a great many people. If it is permissible to kill one in order to save a billion, then not even Gewirth's right is absolute.
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The first Congress to meet under the Constitution did indeed draft a Bill of Rights, which the states ratified in 1791. There appears to have been little debate over what became the Second Amendment, other than some tampering with the wording, and as some scholars have noted, the drafters agreed on certain basic premises, namely, that citizens should have a constitutional right to serve in militias in defense of state and country, and that in order for the militias to be viable, individuals had to have the right to own weapons. The importance of the amendment at the time lay not in its ensuring individual rights; rather, it should be seen as part of a larger debate over federalism, the balance of power that would be shared by the states and the national government. Although the Constitution provided a far stronger central government than had existed under the Articles of Confederation, fears about a powerful national government, backed by standing armies, still existed, and the militias would give the states and their people not only the means to defend themselves against external attack but ... should the worst fears of the anti-Federalists materialize, against a depraved national government itself.
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[One] deleterious consequence of rights talk that Glendon picks out is its tendency to move the moral focus toward agents as rightholders, instead of toward agents as bearers of responsibilities. This critique is developed by O'Neill (1996). A focus on rightholders steers moral reasoning toward the perspective of recipience, instead of toward the traditional active ethical questions of what one ought to do and how one ought to live. Rights talk ... leads those who use it to neglect important virtues, such as courage and beneficence, which involve obligations to which no rights correspond. Finally, the use of rights language encourages people to make impractical demands, since one can assert a right without any attention to whether it is desirable or even possible to burden others with the corresponding obligations.
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This is discouraging for people trying to encourage social change, such as animal rights. For example, the brains of people who eat meat are predisposed to discounting pro-vegetarian messages -- even irrefutable evidence about the mistreatment of farm animals and the health consequences of the Standard American Diet -- to "protect" the person from feeling torn about their personal choices. In essence, the brain "turns off" its analytical centers so it doesn't have to process this information that is creating a conflict, which is not pleasurable. This is all done subconsciously.
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[M]ost pre-modern conceptions of rights were hierarchical, with different people being granted different rights, and some having more rights than others. For instance, the rights of a father to be respected by his son did not indicate a duty upon the father to return that respect, and the divine right of kings to hold absolute power over their subjects did not leave room for many rights to be granted to the subjects themselves. The concept of natural right developed in the School of Salamanca in the late 16th century, and first gained widespread acceptance nearly 200 years later, during the Age of Enlightenment.
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