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jknoepfler | 11 months ago

If you think there's an inviolable set of Ur rights that aren't intrinsically in conflict, then articulate them. Your inability to articulate them cogently suggests that they don't exist... not that every argument to the contrary is false because they must exist.

Refusing to think critically and insisting "muh absolute rights must be real" isn't an argument, it's a (peculiarly male, American, sad) fantasy. Yeehaw, cowboy fantasy land.

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pdonis|11 months ago

> If you think there's an inviolable set of Ur rights

I made no such claim. Of course any right can be violated, since rights aren't laws of physics, they're agreements that citizens of a civil society make with each other in order to be able to build wealth through cooperation, specialization, and trade. And people always have the ability to violate agreements. That doesn't mean they should, it just means they can. And of course there are always people who do. But that doesn't mean there has to be conflict between the rights themselves. It just means there are always at least some people who refuse to respect other people's rights, and we have to have some kind of plan for dealing with them.

> Your inability to articulate them cogently

I don't know where you're getting that from, since the old saying I mentioned already contains the basic answer: life, liberty, property. (I might also add the pursuit of happiness, from the Declaration of Independence.) But it's true that it's easy to misunderstand what those rights mean, particularly "liberty", and to think that they must be in conflict because, for example, my "liberty" has to include the right to take your life if I feel like it. But that's nonsense, and there is plenty of literature in philosophy, ethics, and political science expounding a proper concept of "liberty" that includes the obvious point that your right to liberty does not include violating the rights of others.

> Refusing to think critically

Is exactly the problem with people who can't understand how there can be a set of basic rights that aren't in conflict, because they can't, for example, imagine any concept of "liberty" that isn't "I can do whatever I feel like".