I continually run across arguments where people fail to understand that morality is not **always and automatically** about **rights** *per se*, and particularly not necessarily about the intellectual equivalent of **legal** rights, which immediately create contradictions and presume an adversarial stance for their resolution.

What schools of philosophy have criticised 'rights' as an inadequate moral or political framing, and what are the best approaches those alternatives suggest for framing moral interaction?

I would like to avoid framings obsessed with conflict and control, since I think this is the most counterproductive aspect of most rights-talk. But any clear alternative framework would be interesting.

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To forestall further attempts to explain rights to me, I have an understanding of their purpose and use, which you are probably not going to talk me out of.

In my picture of the world, rights are a completely secondary manipulation to get people to act morally. They simplify the communication of moral intent, but they have nothing, intrinsically, to do with what is or is not moral. That needs to be established by some other underlying perspective.

If you have the right to raise your children as you wish, that does not mean all ways of raising children are equally moral. Your right to free speech does not mean that whatever you say to me is never evil, and you have no moral reason to be civil. In such situations, rights are an excuse to look no further, and a barrier to genuine ethical inquiry.

Also as a manipulation, they have to be open about their intent, which they never are. People retrench into their own sense of their own rights as if they are the actual content of the ethics. So they do not realize when their defensive position contradicts the moral motivation for the right itself.