rights

Why do people have rights? Why do we say that rights exist?
I suppose it is because we believe in them. We even tend to write them down in our law books and ethics guidelines. Rights have no physical existence and, in a godless universe, have no absolute meaning. At their core, rights exist because we are willing to fight for them or do actually fight for them. It is violence or the threat of violence which props up the concept. Rights are defensible, a lawyer would say. Fight for your rights, people sometimes shout, which really is the core of their existence.  
Once again, greed and aggression are the drivers of human society – in the case of rights, it is mostly aggression driving the concept.