It's rare to come across a person who properly understands rights. I like to joke, how humane our rights are, since the most conscientious government of Netherlands recognized a gorilla as innately having 'human rights'! - how really, truly humane is that?
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Interesting point. What I said can also be applied to speaking about animal rights. I'll resist comedy here regarding gorillas voting, owning property, etc.; I presume that such rights involve conditions of imprisonment and such.
You state that rights don't exist, but that's fallacious.
A gazelle has the right to life, as do lions. People, on the other hand, have those same rights, and the need to defend them, but are also bound to a higher standard: to respect the rights of others.
To fail to do so is a moral failure in every society that has ever been, and continues to be so now. Therefore, lawful societies are bound to recognize that individual persons have rights that must be respected, or criminal depredation--we are not animals that can prey on one another--results.
Just societies are bound to enforce the rights commonly enjoyed by their people, and the degree to which a society is just can be measured by the degree to which the rights of man are enforced.
To claim otherwise is to claim we are nothing but animals, and the sheep need fear the wolves without hope of lawful remedy.
I am a man, not a sheep nor a wolf. I am bound to respect your rights, and you are mine. Are you a man or an animal? You answer not with words, but with your life. As you live, you either live as a man, or an animal.
Rights exist because we are people, and inure to people by sole virtue of their existence. To maintain otherwise is to impugn the very essence of society, and reckon us chattel.
Your post exemplifies social media at its best. We are both correct. It is our nature as humans to construct societies characterized by liberty and justice, and it is our nature as humans to speak of "human rights" and "animal rights". But how do such words become realized in the societies that we construct? With the threat of lethal force.
IOW, notions of rights, of justice, of liberty, are just that: notions and words and visions of possibilities. To make such visions real, order must be imposed, and that is done by the men, with lethal force.
There are other ways to create order than lethal force.
Indeed, almost all order is created by other means.
That lethal force exists does not obviate rights. Crime exists. There is no doubt of that. Crime is the violation of the rights of another.
Rights are the very basis of human society, and if we have no rights, crime doesn't exist.
When I look out the window, I see order. That order is imposed by lethal force. Ideas about rights might have entered into the design of that order. But without lethal force, those beautiful ideas would be no more than beautiful ideas in the midst of chaos. (The chaos would be only temporary, because some group of men would come along and impose their own preferred kind of order, which might not be based upon notions of "rights" at all.)
All of the order in human society is ultimately imposed by lethal force. There are no exceptions. If you think you can identify an exception, state it and we will take a look at it.
Exactly. Force or the threat of force is what props up civilization and makes rights rights.
Here's an example from everyday life. A man may feel himself entitled to a certain level of dignity but that would mean nothing to his fellows if he did not prevail upon them by force, open threat or implicit threat (e.g. quid pro quo) to respect him as a sovereign person.
Your example does illustrate the point, but is problematic for other reasons. (1) The penal statutes of a territory, combined with the police power, force other men to treat him with dignity. (2) Men who are truly bonded in real community voluntarily respect one another by force of love. (3) Although I dream of a future in which individuals are sovereign, anyone who claims to be sovereign today is delusional.