Legal Rights and Moral Convictions

The rights that the law protects are the ones that can be imposed on the citizens who are within the jurisdictions of such law. The determinations of what rights citizens must possess must not be guided by some religious or metaphysical principles, since such principles are usually difficult to conclusively, universally or objectively justify. Rights must be determined as byproducts of social contracts that are eventually established in a community that promotes the sustainability of individual lives, fairly distributed individual liberties, and the common happiness of the general population. Generally, a citizen must have the right to do whatever he wants to do as long as he or she does not cause direct physical harm on another citizen or direct damages to privately or publicly owned properties. Considering that fetuses are not technically citizens (unless we arbitrarily include them), the mother’s right to have an abortion must qualify within the scope of the legally protectable rights. The right to marry a same-sex partner is also within the range of such rights. Of course, one can still view that some usages of such rights are immoral, without denying that they are legally protectable rights. The absence of religiously neutral reason for the immorality of abortion or same-sex marriage makes it impossible to justifiably and objectively legalize its prohibitions. For example, we have a religiously neutral reason for the immorality of enslaving a certain group of humans, since the major claims that are used to support such kind of slavery can easily be proven false without appealing to religion. Some people P may justify the slavery of a certain ethnic group G by claiming that members of G are intellectually and physically inferior. If some members of G exhibit intellectual and physical abilities that are equal or superior to some conventional standards that are used by P, then P’s claim about G must be false.