Orthodox secularists typically say that we should respect the rights of others, even as we go about the business of satisfying our own desires. Ultimately, however, secularism cannot provide any plausible account of where rights come from or why we should respect others rights. Of course, most secularists emphatically believe that people have rights. Indeed, they frequently accuse Christians and other religious believers of supporting policies that violate people s rights. You religious people shouldn t be imposing your values on other people.
Women have a right to abortion.
People have a right to take their own lives. While one still hears subjectivism or relativism invoked at cocktail parties and in undergraduate classrooms and even occasionally in faculty lounges it seems that the heyday of moral relativism is over, even among doctrinaire secularists. Most sophisticated secularists have concluded that relativism is ultimately inconsistent with many of their own cherished moral claims, particularly those having to do with claims about rights the right to abortion, the right to sexual freedom, the right to die. If relativism is true, then it is not wrong in principle to have an abortion, but neither is it wrong for people who happen to abhor abortion to attempt to legislate against it or to interfere with someone else s having an abortion by, say, blockading clinics or even shooting abortionists. Claims of a right to abortion are manifestly moral claims.