Moral Rights

Abstract Important ways of using the term moral rights (or human rights or natural rights) can be captured if moral rights are contrasted with legal rights. Legal rights are artifacts of a legal process. Whatever moral rights are, they are not that. Rather, a claim of moral right is a claim about what legal rights people ought to have. For example, when a woman in the 19th century claimed a moral right to open a bank account in her own name, her point was not, “My right is set out in a statute; you can look it up.” Rather, she was making a claim about what her legal standing ought to be.