| | I am confused as to why everyone here seems so confused about the concept of "rights." It seems that the same ground is covered again and again in the same or different threads.
I thought that Rand did a pretty good job in defining what is meant by a "right," although it certainly could be expanded and clarified.
Paraphrasing and summarizing: To say that one has a "right," is to say that one may ethically and morally prohibit, by the use of a rationally justified degree of force, if necessary, someone else from interfering with one's action in a given context. All rights start with the right to one's life qua human being, and start with the right to one's physical functioning body and the actions necessary to sustain it. I.e., one may morally and ethically prohibit someone else from directly killing or injuring one, for starters.
Other derivative rights, such as the right to property, follow from the "actions necessary to sustain it." Because long-term action involving stable physical and intellectual assets is essential for life as a human being, especially in a modern context, we have developed an intellectual infrastructure to secure rights to those assets, such as land or other physical or intellectual properties.
In a primitive context, this might be the exclusive right to use a bunch of rocks to build a dam on a stream. Once one has announced or otherwise indicated that one is going to use the rocks for a particular purpose and has spent energy in doing so, then, ceteris paribus, no one else has the right to start breaking up the dam to use the rocks for his house.
This simple example can only be carried so far. Suppose multiple people all have conflicting plans for the rocks? Who decides and how? As more people use more and more scarce resources, the primitive model, reflecting a relative abundance of unused potential property, has to give way to a rational allocation of resources that everyone can see is inherently fair. The model then becomes more that of a O-Neil colony (for simplification), where virtually everything is owned by the entity that owns the colony itself.
In that case, with a lack of outside, unclaimed resources, the proprietor would seek a fair and reasonable way to get the most profits from the use of those scarce resources. Since top-down management has its own problems of information corruption, due to positive feedback, just for one example, the most likely general mechanism in most cases would be a public auction for original property claims, with the procedes going to the proprietor. If the proprietor were a share-holding entity, such as the Mondragon Cooperative, then the procedes would go to the shareholders.
But I digress. The bottom line is that the relationships among people are objective facts. They have a particular identity. For these relationships to work over time among people in a society, they must satisfy certain base criteria. Among these criteria are a definition of what actions are inherently permisable and which are not. The concept of rights starts with the individual interests and creates a conceptual bridge to the collective by specifying what kind of rules can be justified. The particulars of the rules may vary from society to society, such as what kind of judicial procedures can be considered valid. Whatever those particular procedures are, however, they must still satisfy the original criteria spelled out by the concept of human "rights."
The devil is in the details, of course.
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