What we have a right to do may not in fact be right to do. The difference is crucial and it must be embedded in the law itself, because only then can we prevent the collapse of the morally right into the legally right. Acknowledging the limits of the law is indispensable to preserving the recognition of a moral order beyond it.
Conversely, relieving legality of the burden of moral rightness is also indispensable to its preservation. The legal and the moral must remain distinct if they are to perform their roles of supporting and facilitating one another.
http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a39f7ad0d0b86.htm
You might be interested in reading this 6 year old post I made.
I read your post and agree with it. Clearly, in our society individual rights have trumped any concept of doing what is right. We no longer recognize any moral order outside of the law or outside of our own values. And this is not primarily a political problem, it is not the result of our political/economic system. It is a philosophical problem. The West has abandoned its traditional moral philosophy, which was Aristotelian, in favor of a moral philosophy, or ethics, which sees all morality as subjective, as ultimately deriving from the individual's will and not from any objective order. As Professor Alasdair McIntyre of the University of Notre Dame has written, while we have a language of morality, that language no longer has the same meaning that it used to have nor does it mean the same thing to everyone any more. What is moral to one person is immoral to another. The result is that our debates on important moral and political issue are not only acrimonious but they are incapable of being resolved. Frankly, I don't see any easy solution to this.