Waldron's Putdown

Talk of individual rights is often supposed to be a way of registering fairly basic objections to the arcane computations of the utilitarian calculus. It is the utilitarian who is supposed to be telling us that everything is all very complicated, and that whether we allow horrible things like torture, censorship, or the execution of the innocent depends on all the circumstances, long-run calculations of probability, etc. The theorist of rights, by contrast, is supposed to be the one who can produce the trump card, the preemptory argument-stopper: 'Thou shalt not kill. The idea of rights has often been seized on precisely  as a way of avoiding the casuistry of trade-offs and complex moral calculations - a way of insisting that certain basics are to be secured an certain atrocities prohibited, come what may. But if rights themselves are morally complicated, the spectre of casuistry reappears. Complicated problems presumably require complicated solutions; but it was the simplicity of rights-based constraints that was supposed to be their main advantage over other more recondite and precarious modes of moral reasoning.The sad fact is, however, that this simplicity and moral certainty is simply unavailable.

- Jeremy Waldron, A Rights-Based Critique of a Bill of Rights.