I've honestly given up believing in anything like rights. Everybody seems to have different opinions on what they are, and they never seem to match up with what governments actually do. I'm not sure it's actually a useful word.
Authors who have given robust analytical treatments of rights include Rawls, Habermas, and Kant.
I think the concept is at least useful if you want to protect a right. Without it, in practice, it would be much more difficult to defend against the controlling capacity of raw force.
