Inalienable rights and our social fabric

"...some rights, such as trial by jury, are social rights, arising neither from natural law nor from positive law but from the social contract from which a government derives its authority."

- James Madison, 4th. U.S. President

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I have recently read several articles that seem to posit that there is no such thing as "inalienable rights", that people do not, by virtue of our society, gain any special protections other than those written into law. Based on this line of reasoning, there is no such thing as basic human rights.

The idea of inalienable rights, the basic rights all people are assumed to have by most rational people, is a construct designed to help maintain the fabric of our society. To say that they do not exist is to say that human beings are nothing more than animals. Yes, people can behave as animals do, living by the credo "might makes right", but they are also reasoned, artistic, philosophical beings capable of rational thought. As such, there is more at work in human society than base Darwinism. Humans can affect their own destinies; they are not slaves to chance.

And so it follows that human society is greater than the sum of its parts, not simply a herd comprised of a large group of animals. The inalienable rights implied by our social structure is simply, to use a Matrix reference: "the sum of a remainder of an unbalanced equation", a logical byproduct of that structure. To argue against this is to deny that any such structure exists, and to deny that society exists is a rank refusal to accept our own reality.