“Legal conflicts often reflect moral dilemmas, the juxtaposition of different ways of seeing values and their hierarchy. And we mustn’t forget that visions of the world change very quickly. Two centuries ago, or even less, the vast majority of people in the West (normal people, often decent, honest people) believed that inequality between blacks and whites, men and women was just and moral. They believed it was just that they should have different rights. They believed homosexuality was a disease or a crime. Obviously the list could be extended, to include for example the rights of children, the very awareness of children as human beings with rights of their own.

“Have you ever wondered which of our current moral beliefs will be rejected or even seem grotesque to future generations?

“Do rights come from nature? If they do, how can we know that a certain right exists and what its characteristics are? Thomas Hobbes defined natural laws as those that have been laws since time immemorial. Unfortunately, there are no laws of this kind.

“Nature is morally neutral. It consists of wonderful things and horrible things. It makes no distinction between right and wrong. In nature there are no rewards or punishments, only consequences.

“Think for example of the family, a category that’s often invoked – often in bad faith – by some inept supporters of 120the existence of natural rights. Think of how the family was regulated in our system before the reform of 1975. It was a family founded on the subordination of the wife to her husband in personal relations, in property relations, in relations with the children. A family founded on the discrimination of children born out of wedlock from so-called legitimate children.

“If you had discussed the idea of the natural family in the 1950s, you would very likely have found people prepared to maintain firmly that such a family was in fact one based on the above-mentioned subordination and the above-mentioned discrimination. People no different from those who nowadays insist on denying rights to same-sex couples.

“All laws, says Jeremy Bentham, are imperfect and constantly changing human inventions. Even so-called natural law in all its variants is a human invention, disguised as a discovery or a revelation to give it greater authority.

“Abandoning this historical perspective, and looking at the present day, we must acknowledge the existence of different and opposing moral systems. The plurality of points of view about facts and values serves as an antidote to the danger of the absolute truths believed in by fanatics, about which the philosopher Norberto Bobbio spoke in a famous essay.