lovett
Deity
- Joined
- Sep 21, 2007
- Messages
- 2,570
True. I have a specific basis for my line in the sand. Souron's seems arbitrary, but I'd best not assume that it is.
There is only one type of legal right that should exist, negative liberties. Freedom from restraint. Any positive freedom takes away someone else's negative freedom. So it shouldn't exist.
If there is, for instance, a "Right not to starve" there must, therefore, be a right to food. But what if you don't own any? What if other people own the food? To say they have a right to coercively take it is to deny property rights entirely. To only sometimes defend property rights without a clear basis for when you do and when you don't is arbitrary.
Your specific basis: To grant any legal rights but negative liberties is to deny property rights entirely.
This is patently false. Our own society's grant legal rights in excess of negative liberties, but they don't deny property rights entirely. Indeed, it is quite easy to see how we could bifurcate property rights. There are many ways to do this. For instance, Property rights, consist in control and income rights. Control rights are the rights to determine how one's property is used and income rights are the rights to garner income from that use; to increase one's property from that use. One can have one without the other. Alternatively, and of obvious relevance to your example, we can just say that property rights aren't unlimited. One has full property rights up until the point one's property rights cause someone to starve. And then one loses -in a temporary and restricted way- said rights.
The are many, many more ways to restrict property rights with legal rights in excess of those to negative liberty that do not entail the complete denial of property rights.