What’s so moral about the “moral rights” of copyright for academics?

"Copyright is generally considered to consist of two components: economic rights and moral rights. The former is designed to give a time-limited monopoly to content producers so that they can materially benefit from the mental labour 'invested' in the creation of 'intellectual property'. As has already been Peter Suber and others, under the theoretical model that underpins academic remuneration (which doesn’t take into account precarity or royalties/advances – with which I fundamentally disagree), academics do not use the economic rights of copyright; publishers do. The other side of copyright consists of the 'moral rights' of the author. These are often broken down into three separate components: the right to attribution, the right to a pseudonym if desired and the right to the integrity of the work (to object to derogatory treatment of the work). Some critics of open licensing for open access work feel that open licensing, and particularly the more liberal Creative Commons attribution licenses, do grave damage to the moral rights of the academic author. What is the basis for these moral rights, though? What, exactly, is moral about them? And is the law the best way to enforce this in order to advance the espoused goals of the university? In this post, I want to provocatively explore those questions ..."