ABSTRACT
The history of right charts the gradual decline of the ethics of virtue and the good and the rise of a morality of individual preferences and rights. Ethics after virtue has been turned into legal commands, law-like interdictions and injunctions the other side of the pursuit of individual desires. The Jewish and Christian legality of divine commandments opened the possibility of a created or posited – positive – law. Christianity broke the unity creating a sharp dualism between visible and invisible, terrestrial and celestial and prioritizing the supernatural over the natural. Early Christianity renounced this world and accepted suffering as the wages of sin and fall. Liberal theories are legal doctrines about the state of nature, its savage but all too real inhabitants, the effects of their contracts, sovereign and individuals with rights. In late modernity, rights are the main language of morality but also the site, tool and reward of politics.
