Since rights are basically claims, they cannot be taken as the entire field of a moral life in which some recognition must be given to the virtues. Most virtues, after all, seek to limit or inhibit the range of claims. Virtues are about what we ought to do, and here controversy is unavoidable. Some argue that no coherent structure of virtues can today be discovered because immigration has created a "multicultural society". This is the cue for the advance of an aspiratory virtue of tolerance. It would be nice if we didn't kill, damage or disdain each other. Politicians are certainly clear that we ought to tolerate each other.

There are, however, at least two problems with this. The first is that one group of social moralists deplores tolerance as a rather arrogant virtue. Toleration is entirely compatible with disdain, and these moralists want to demand the deeper virtue called "acceptance", which requires that we should recognise that all ways of life are of equal value, and we should respect them as such. This is so powerful a moral conviction among politicians and teachers, for example, that proposals have been made to incorporate it in the curriculum of schools. That all peoples and ways of life are equally valuable is a doctrine advanced in favour of whole classes of  "vulnerables" in our society, ranging from homosexuals to ethnic groups. Nobody of course believes in the equal value of all ways of life for a moment, although there is a lot of pious saluting.

Secondly, acceptance as a programme collides with human nature. Human beings — or at least our European lot-are manic generalisers. Many Christians and Muslims agree in deploring homosexual liberation, while secularists so deplore religion that they want to root it out of European life altogether. Society-indeed all societies — are haunts of value judgments, most of them foolish, all of them of the most limited range. One or two bad experiences with class X and we embrace a generalisation. Much of this, probably most of it, is harmless, because civility and human manners — often foolishly called a "veneer" — impel most people to behave decently toward classes of people they don't like. But this universal propensity of human beings is widely thought to raise what we might call "the Hitler problem". Hitler had mad ideas about Jews, and then tried to wipe them out. Ultimately, then, we will only be safe from discrimination, indeed from the danger of genocide, when we teach people a different way of being. The bizarre endeavours of communist states to create a new kind of human being are almost realistic in comparison with this project. It is, however, the basic premise of the thing called "political correctness" which has become so dangerous a force for servility and deceit in our world. Further, it is entrenched in law.

The question I have posed is thus at the centre of our lives, and the difficulty of finding an answer tells us a great deal about ourselves. One reason for that difficulty results from the morality of sex. Virginia Woolf, it may be remembered, suggested sex had been invented back in December 1910. If so, it was such a runaway success that within 50 years it was liberated entirely from the ferocious conventions of past times, and led to the view that all consensual forms of sexual conduct were a universal right. Well — almost all. A major and dramatic exception was made for paedophilia, which has become so central to our moral sentiments as to tempt us into a second universal law of human nature.

As we have seen, disdain for other sets of people seems absolutely entrenched in the human psyche. The anti-discriminatory enthusiasm of political correctness in no way weakens this tendency, for disdain now focuses on ideologically specified classes of people such as racists or xenophobes rather than on religious or racial classes of people. Here in the paedophile case we have another basic constant of human life: outrage. I am not, of course, dissenting from this response, but I do observe that it does seem to be a constant in human moral life. Treatment of moral faults in the media sustain this rather athletic sense of vice and virtue, and keep it in good repair, as perhaps illustrated in my favourite recent tabloid headline: "Love rat in pregnancy shock."