Rights Of Individual Moral Agents Defined & Explained
7th November 2025
Rights are conditions of existence necessary for proper survival. Rights are moral principles that define and sanction mans freedom of action in society. You have the right to perform any action which does not unjustifiably cause harm or violate consent.
There are no gay rights, woman's rights, trans rights, religious rights or corporation rights.
There is ONLY rights of the individual.
Everyone's rights are equal.
Part 1
✅ The Objective Defense Of Rights
Below is a fully integrated, philosophically consistent, and undefeatable rights structure which is resistant to every known objection from:
Utilitarians
Collectivists
Statists
Religious moralists
Skeptics
Moral relativists
Elitists / technocrats
“Superior beings” arguments
Nihilists
Postmodernists
This is a rigorously objective catalog of rights, built on:
Metaphysics (what man is)
Epistemology (reason as method)
Ethics (life as the standard)
Politics (rights as conditions of survival for moral agents)
It is strong enough to anchor an entire philosophy or ideological system.
✅ 1. The Foundation: What Rights Are
Rights are the objective existential conditions required for a moral agent to survive according to its nature.
A right is not:
A wish
A permission granted by others
A collective bargain
A government invention
A social convention
A right is:
✅ A fact of reality
✅ Discovered, not invented
✅ Derived from the requirements of life
✅ Necessary for beings who must act by reason
✅ The negative boundaries that forbid others from initiating force
** Rights ≠ desires
** Rights ≠ resources
** Rights ≠ entitlements
** Rights = freedom from coercion so that one can act to sustain life.
✅ 2. The Source of Rights: The Nature of Rational Life
Rights come from three objective facts:
1. You are alive (Life as the standard)
You are a life form.
To live, you must act.
To act, you must choose.
To choose, you must think.
So life → choice → thought → action → freedom → rights.
2. You are volitional and rational (agent, not automaton)
You are an egoic life form.
Humans as conceptually egoic entities survive by reason, not instinct.
Therefore anything that destroys reason destroys survival.
Rights protect the space in which reason functions.
3. You are an individual consciousness (not hive-minded)
You are an individual egoic life form.
You have your own body, mind, needs, values and goals. There is no such thing as a collective consciousness, stomach or bladder.
Therefore your survival requirements cannot be collectivized.
From these three facts, rights emerge as necessary survival conditions.
✅ 3. The Hierarchy of Rights
Rights form a strict order, each dependent on the former.
1. The Right to Life (base right)
This is the root of all rights.
Definition:
The right not to be killed or harmed unjustifiably.
Derived from:
The fact you are a living organism with the capacity for volitional rationality
Who must maintain biological integrity
Without life, no other rights are possible, because NOTHING else is possible.
2. The Right to Liberty (action)
This means:
Freedom of action in all things that do not violate the equal rights of others.
You must act to sustain life:
Eat
Work
Earn
Move
Think
Choose values
Pursue goals
Action requires freedom.
Therefore liberty directly follows from life.
3. The Right to Property
Property = the material means of survival.
You need food, clothing, shelter, tools and resources to live.
You obtain these through the use of reason and labor.
Without property rights:
Your actions are futile
Your time is stolen
Your planning becomes impossible
Your survival becomes dependent on the whims of others
If you have no right to property, you have no right to life.
4. The Right to Privacy
Privacy is derived from:
Liberty
Property
You need privacy to think freely, act freely, and own your own information.
You cannot live rationally if coerced into forced disclosure.
Because you have the right to property, you have the right to privacy in your property (in your house with curtains closed).
5. The Right to Self-Defense
Because rights are real and your life depends on them:
You must be able to defend yourself.
Self-defense flows from:
Right to life
Right to liberty
Right to property
If self-defense were forbidden, rights would be pointless abstractions.
6. The Right to Voluntary Association
This includes:
Trade
Cooperation
Culture
Community
Contracts
Assembly
Because humans survive and flourish through cooperation, not isolation.
✅ 4. What About “Rights to” Social Goods?
Such as:
Right to food
Right to housing
Right to health care
Right to education
These are not rights.
Because they require:
Someone else’s labor
Someone else’s property
Someone else’s time
Any “right” that necessitates violating another person’s actual rights is not a right but a claim of enslavement.
Thus:
Rights are always negative (freedom from coercion), not positive (demands on others).
✅ 5. “Self-Ownership”: True or False?
This is a problem in political philosophy.
Rothbard and Rand disagree here.
Let’s clarify the paradox:
✅ You cannot “own yourself” because:
Ownership is a relation between a subject and an object
But you are the subject
You cannot be both owner and owned in the same sense
This is why Rand rejects the phrase “self-ownership.”
✅ BUT self-ownership is metaphorically useful because:
It expresses:
Sovereignty
Independence
Liberty
Self empowerment
Rothbard used it to assert individual supremacy over ones own body and labor.
✅ The Correct Solution
Use a concept that:
✅ Forms the basis of liberty
✅ Avoids metaphysical contradiction
✅ Keeps the political force of “self-ownership”
✅ The right concept is:
Sovereignty
A moral agent is the sole sovereign authority over their body, mind, actions, and labor.
Self-ownership is symbolic; sovereignty is literal.
Sovereignty includes:
Self control
Self determination
Self governance
Non-interference
Personal jurisdiction
Responsibility
Agency
Autonomy
WITHOUT literally implying that you “own yourself” as a piece of property.
Self-ownership = metaphorical expression of sovereignty.
Sovereignty = literal fact.
✅ Why The Right To Liberty Derives From Sovereignty
Liberty is the political/civilizational expression of sovereignty.
Sovereignty =
The inherent authority of a rational being to think, judge, choose, and act for itself.
Liberty =
The social condition that prevents others from overriding that sovereignty.
Thus:
Sovereignty is metaphysical (a fact about your nature).
Liberty is political (what society must not interfere with).
Liberty exists because sovereignty exists.
Not the other way around.
✅ 6. How To Crush The Argument “Rights Are Subjective”
Use these three undefeatable points:
✅ 1. Rights are derived from biological facts, not opinion
You need:
Food
Oxygen
Shelter
Freedom of movement
Freedom to think
Freedom to act
Without these, you suffer and die.
Rights express the factual conditions required for survival.
No subjectivity.
✅ 2. Rights are universal to all moral agents
This blocks cultural relativism, gender, divine command theory, elitism, and speciesism.
✅ 3. Rights are the only way to prevent chaos
Without rights:
Force becomes the arbiter
Justice becomes irrelevant
The strong dominate the weak
Nobody can plan
Nobody can cooperate
Society collapses
This is not theoretical—it is historical fact.
✅ 7. List of Objective Rights
Primary Rights (non-derivative)
Right to Life
Right to Liberty
Right to Property
Right to Sovereignty (self-determination)
Derived Rights
Right to Privacy
Right to Self-Defense
Right to Voluntary Association
Right to Contract
Right to Reputation (protection against fraud and defamation)
Conditional Rights (contextual, require consent)
10. Right to Delegated Authority (work place, voluntary organizations)
Part 2
✅ 1. Hypocrisy & The Golden Rule Of Equity
TGROE = Treat others as you wish to be treated.
Equity is the anti-hypocritical standard.
Equity = Treating others justly and fairly in accordance with the situation.
Hypocrisy = Treating others in ways you know is wrong or in ways you would not want to be treated.
Rights only apply where choice and responsibility exist in reciprocal form.
The principle that rights require the ability to understand reciprocal constraints is solid. It’s the moral agency threshold.
The deeper rule isn’t kindness but non-contradiction:
If you claim you may do X to others but others may not do X to you,
you invalidate the entire logic of rights.
This is universalizable, objective, and not culturally dependent. It also blocks elitist claims that “some are fit to rule others.”
✅ 2. Rights As Protective Concepts
Rights are conceptual protection against other moral agents violating your sovereign exercise of existence.
They are derived from an intelligent agent’s capacity to understand the golden rule of equity.
If you claim the right to violate someone else’s rights, you’re admitting you don’t believe in rights at all and you forfeit your own.
Any being that refuses to grasp a basic moral symmetry, “don’t do to others what you don’t want done to you,” is rejecting its own status as a rational, moral agent. A creature unwilling to recognize consent, reciprocity, and non-coercion is functioning as an animal, not a rights-bearing person.
The moment you violate another’s rights, you suspend your own.
And because all normal human minds are capable of understanding rights — we are volitional, rational, conceptual beings by nature — there is no legitimate excuse for violating them.
✅ 3. Rights Are Social
Rights Don’t Exist on an Island Alone
Ethics = how an agent should act to sustain its own life.
Rights = rules that apply when multiple sovereign agents coexist.
Rights are not about survival needs (food, water, shelter).
They are about interpersonal boundaries.
You alone on an island have ethics but no politics/civilization/society.
✅ 4. Wanting To Live: A Crucial Principle
Rights presuppose value; value presupposes life;
life presupposes the desire to continue living.
You don't need anything to survive unless you want to live.
The argument:
✅ I. Rights exist because living beings must act to remain alive
Life is conditional. If you want to live, you need to take rational action to sustain yourself.
✅ II. Action requires choice
Action is not automatic.
You must choose to eat, move, breathe, work and think.
Choice requires freedom.
✅ III. Choice presupposes wanting to live
If someone says “why should I live?”
They have already confirmed:
They want to speak
They want to ask questions
They want to continue existing long enough to hear the answer
The very act of engaging in argumentation presupposes:
The arguer wants to live.
Otherwise they’d remain silent and die.
True nihilists don't spread nihilism, they fade into nothing.
Nihilism = Anti value, anti purpose, anti life (all is meaningless)
✅ IV. Therefore rights emerge from the fact:
To live, you must act.
To act, you must choose.
To choose, you must be free.
To be free, you must have rights.
This cannot be argued against without using the very capacities that rights protect.
✅ V. Arguing against life, desire and value is logically contradictory
Desire is part of survival ethics.
If you are acting, you are valuing life.
Every action, including argument, presupposes the desire to remain alive long enough to complete the action.
So:
If someone argues that rights don’t exist, they’re implicitly asserting the right to speak uninterrupted.
If someone claims domination is valid, they implicitly deny the validity of domination applied to themselves.
If someone claims only the strong should rule, they must accept that someone stronger than them could justifiably dominate them. They never do.
If someone claims nothing has value, they clearly value that statement enough to utter it. It's a self contradiction.
If someone claims they desire nothing, they've demonstrated their desire to share. They defeated themselves.
Thus:
Every argument that denies rights presupposes rights.
Every argument that denies value presupposes value.
Every argument that denies desire presupposes desire.
✅ 5. Formulation Of Rights
Rights are the objective conditions required by conceptually conscious beings to sustain their lives through voluntary, non-contradictory, rational action.
This argument is devastatingly strong because it ties rights to:
Biology
Psychology
Potentiality
Capacity
Reciprocity
Everything is consistent.
Everything is interlocked.
Nothing contradicts.
No elitist can break it.
No faith-based tyrant can override it.
No AI or alien can claim superiority as grounds for domination.