re: #93 iossarian

You say “rights that can infringe on or affect others, and rights that can’t”. But it’s all shades of gray.

It’s not. You really can classify them to in one way or another. You can show that there’s negative effects from some personal rights— like, if I mainline heroin, it may cause the state to spend resources on me— but I’m still not taking the right of anyone else away.

In the end, if you engage in full cultural relativity, and pure definition-by-convention, then nothing can actually have any meaning, not distinctions can be made, since they’re all just arbitrary distinctions. And you can’t talk about anything.

For some reason, you thought I— or others— were arguing from inarguable first principles. I’m not. In our definition of ‘rights’, our subjective one, there is still always the distinction between rights that can impinge on another’s and those that can’t, that cannot possible affect the rights of another.