ABSTRACT
The use of the terminology of "rights" is so well entrenched in legal, philosophical, and everyday speech that it is hard to imagine that it was not always an element in these areas of discourse. For instance, many people pass immediately from the option right that a woman may have to undergo an abortion to the welfare right to be provided with the facilities to have one. The chapter presents the encapsulated history of the development of the terminology of rights partly in order to draw out a point from it. It suggests that moral rights language is at least "legalistic". Its sphere of operation is in the legalistic side of moral discourse, which is the area of potentially conflicting claims, claims that individuals make against individuals. The language of rights has become so embedded in our moral speech that we tend to use it without discrimination.
