Quote Originally Posted by Bob Underwood View Post
The problem with our profession is that rights are at stake. If we fail to do our job, those we protect will lose rights (life, liberty, political community etc.). However, if we do our job incorrectly, act on the wrong people or in the wrong way, rights are lost as well. This is what makes morality appropriate to the conversation.
I submit that the problem with this discussion of morality is that it is based on a notion that rights are primary. On such a view, duties (which are the "musts" of moral claims) are artifactual on rights. In other words, because you have a right to life, I have a duty not to kill you.

An alternative point of view is that duties are primary and that rights are artifacts derived from those duties. On this view, your right to life is artifactual on my duty not to harm others.

I suspect that the view of rights as secondary may be somewhat tough to swallow given what the Declaration says about inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But, I submit for reflection the idea that rights derived from duties may be just as inalienable as rights that are primary.

If one wishes to hold that rights are primary, then I think one should be able to explain from where those rights proceed in a way that does not require some appeal to consequences as the source of the rights.
Morality, by its very nature must be universal. That is, the truths of its claims must apply to all people at all times in all places. Otherwise we are simply dealing with useful rules of societal conduct. I submit, along with that eccentric East Prussian Immanuel Kant, that any theory that is based on consequences for evaluating the truth of its moral claims cannot be universal because every one of its prescriptions is conditional--of the form "if..., then...". Should one not desire the antecedent, then the rule of action found in the consequent would not apply.

Universal truths are unconditional. So are duties.