Natural rights are vastly powerful; they are claims that every individual has a certain
moral status that cannot be justly overridden by any government. Natural rights also
are the basis of larger moral visions about what human beings deserve, and how
society should be ordered.

Yet as we've seen, any social order - and particularly a diverse society - may not
reach a broad agreement or consensus about what our natural rights are. So there
are competing moral visions about what natural rights require of us and what they
grant to us. How are we to choose among these visions?      ^-(^ j ^^

IMPLEMENTATIONS OF RIGHTS
Sometimes the enforcement of implementation of natural rights is agonizingly slow;

what seems in retrospect an obvious abuse of rights may take decades or centuries
to set right. For example, one of the most significant legal developments in the
United States during the 20th century has been in the area of civil rights. Legal and
social changes were encouraged by judicial decisions, which applied the 14fh
Amendment - with its rights of due process of law and equal protection of the laws -
to strike down the forcible segregation of the races in America. The moral vision of
a desegregated society has been increasingly realized; few, conservative or liberal,
now dispute the moral conviction that the races should not be forcibly segregated by