A person who loses his voice still has the right to free speech.

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A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.

"Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes toward the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

"I'm a panda," he says at the door. "Look it up."

The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.

"Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."

Actually, owning slaves was never a right. It was legal but it wasn't a right.

Quote:

All rights are based around the protection of what you want. "Natural rights" don't exist, nor are they universal - other than hopeless pseudo-anarchists, few oppose imprisonment for violent offenders.

I'll stick with John Locke on this one.

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A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.

"Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes toward the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

"I'm a panda," he says at the door. "Look it up."

The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.

"Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."

You can stick with John Locke. I will stick with reality. Philosophers can be wrong, but the universe can't. Locke said pretty things but couldn't actually defend them, hence his self-admission of that by appealing to some nonsense about it being self-evident and natural.

Entirely arbitrary balderdash. If its so self-evident, they should be able to prove they exist. But he didn't. THe problem is that rights-based extremists confuse the metaphysical with the physical. They begin to take abstractions as concrete realities.

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If you have to turn to something outside of what you're asserting then it is not self-evident. Self-evident that it is evident without proof.

The reality is that rights exist naturally - independent of societies and governments and independent of one's ability or inability to exercise those rights.

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A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.

"Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes toward the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

"I'm a panda," he says at the door. "Look it up."

The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.

"Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."

Anyone can say something's self evident. That's entirely the problem. It deflects any requirement to demonstrate or provide evidence and reasoning for the thing. You can just sweep away any burden of proof by going "IT'S SELF EVIDENT! LOLZ!!" It's a religious cop-out. Even basic logical principles that are deemed "self-evident" can be explained as to why. If only you and your true-believers see it as self-evident, that's inadequate for argument.

The fundamental problem with rights-theorists such as you is that you conflate natural interests with rights, which are the social protection of the exercise of a welfare interest. All people have natural interests, wants, desires, and needs, but not all of them are made into rights. No one has a "right" to speak freely in nature. You have the ability to speak or the ability to speak freely if you can get away with it, but there is no protection or codification or institutionalization or recognition of the desire politically. Your interest only becomes a right when politically or socially recognized and protected systematically without fear of reprimand by the government. It's a limited allowance of your engaging that interest.

The only way to exercise these interests in the form of a right is by association with others who agree and allow you to do it, protecting it through force or threat of force against others or mutual agreement, hence the formation of socially protected interests--rights. The only reason society created rights concepts was to make society a better, happier, more productive place. It was good for society as a whole. It was never actually created to be good for the individual himself. That's an after thought. If there were a better way to create a functional, happy society, it would replace individual rights.

I couldn't care less what John Locke said about the topic. Maybe you need to parrot philosophers from the 17th century for your opinions, but I don't. Locke also defended slavery within his system too. I guess it must have been valid if he said it, after all. He's John Fricking Locke, right?

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Expression.

Why? Locke wouldn't want to you hold an 18th Century mindset on anything.

Rights do not exist naturally. They are a social invention.