So this is a quote that I begin with.

Rights talk is inherently aggressive, even imperial.

It tends towards moral inflation and militates against accommodation.

Rights talkers with their inner monologues of preemptive resentments

work themselves into a simmering state of annoyed vigilance against any limits on their willfulness, unquote.

That harsh judgment was made by George Will in a column of the Washington Post in 2009.

And in that column in which Will was criticizing Wright's talk, he mentioned one of the most celebrated academic criticisms of rights talk, which was a book published in 1991 called Rights Talk, by the Harvard Law Professor, later U.S. Ambassador to the Vatican, Marianne Glendon.

And this is a sort of, and good Glendon, like George Will,

is kind of a conservative, and this conservative criticism

of rights talk usually focuses on what's seen as a kind of

individualistic, agonistic, kind of zero-sum politics

that flows out of a concentration on rights, which is really no politics at all.

It's more like what's left of politics in a community that's become rigidly legalistic and incapable of honest communal deliberation.

So there's the suggestion that rights are a kind of modern idea connected perhaps causally

with some of the characteristic problems of modern politics, mainly individualism,

a kind of individualism that dilutes the bonds of community and leads to a kind of lonely egoism

that's identified by many social thinkers thinkers but also a politics characterized by constant

rancor and an unwillingness to compromise. That may or may not be an accurate description.

It is, however, accurate in the proposition that the cause of rights talk, or the subject of

rights talk, namely rights, right? Is it an accurate description of that?

And my answer is, it depends. Specifically, it depends on just how one understands rights,

on how one talks about rights. My talk about rights is divided into four parts. First, I want to pose two more specific problems that quickly emerge when we apply ourselves to the question of rights

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