-
@ vinney | opfn.co
2025-02-19 18:40:50
what you're calling "rights" is a partial overlap with what I call "social norms and voluntary agreements" - but you take it further, or at least in unexpected directions.
- window smashed by crowbar: ostensibly, the members of the society surrounding the home (including the window-smasher) have voluntary agreed to the norm "the exclusive control and fate of a man's windows is his alone - nobody else is to violate the owner's plans for the window". This is why it getting broken is a "violation", when uninvited. it breaks that voluntary contract (and why it's not a violation when you hire a demolition crew and invite them to break the window. in that case, refusing to break the window would be a violation because the contract is broken).
- same for the kid's sandcastle, to some degree. My assumption is that a generally agreed-upon norm in the beach community in question is that if you mix your labor with an unclaimed resource, you take ownership of the work product. We're assuming here that the beach is "unclaimed" - however if the sand is in someone's back yard and the kid trespassed and made a castle, the same norms would apply: the people living under this set of norms recognize that the sand belongs to the homeowner and he can do what he wants with it, including stomp on it. (re: the ocean: the kid doesn't have an agreement with the ocean that the ocean violated. the kid needs to learn about the inviolable laws of physics if he wants to protect his work from forces that don't and cannot make voluntary agreements).
- ransom: same story as above. But the jail one is interesting: there is this insane "defacto" understanding that by being born into a society you have agreed to abide by certain laws and by doing so you also agree that if you break them, you consent to being jailed. I happen to personally believe that any agreements you did not actively enter into yourself are illegitimate in that they might be "enforced upon you" whether you like it or not - including arbitrary punishments at the discretion of the enforcer. The obvious response here is: "if you don't like the default agreements, it's on you to leave" - and I am extremely sensitive to that point. As in, I agree its a strong point.
If you had to back me into a corner to agree to anything like "rights violations" it would be as a last resort that one's discretion over how their body is used and where he can to move it (without depriving another of their bodily autonomy) is one of his only "rights" that can be defended consistently. I think there is a decent argument for extending that to legitimately acquired or improved physical property, but its far weaker than bodily autonomy.