Rights Of Individual Moral Agents Defined & Explained
7th November 2025
Rights are necessary conditions for proper survival. You have the right to perform any action which does not unjustifiably cause harm or violate consent.
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
anarchists (when they deny objectivity)
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.
✅ I. The Foundation: What Rights Are
Rights are the objective moral 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.
✅ II. The Source of Rights: The Nature of Rational Life
Rights come from three objective facts:
1. You are alive (Life as the standard).
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).
Humans 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 have your own body, mind, needs, values, goals.
Therefore your survival requirements cannot be collectivized.
From these three facts, rights emerge as necessary survival conditions.
✅ III. 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
who must maintain biological integrity
Without life, no other rights are 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
innovate
choose values
pursue goals
Action requires freedom.
Therefore liberty directly follows from life.
3. The Right to Property (extension of action over time)
Property = the material means of survival.
You need food, shelter, tools, 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
Property is simply action made stable over time.
If you have no right to property, you have no right to life.
4. The Right to Self-Determination (sovereignty)
This includes:
right to choose goals
right to pursue happiness
right to govern your own actions
right to form or leave associations
right to own your mind and choices
This is where “self-ownership” must be clarified (see below).
Sovereignty is the political form of free will.
5. The Right to Privacy (derivative right)
Privacy is not a primary right.
It is derived from:
liberty
property
sovereignty
You need privacy to think freely, act freely, and own your own information.
You cannot live rationally if coerced into forced disclosure.
6. The Right to Self-Defense (essential corollary)
If rights are real, then:
You must be able to defend them.
Self-defense flows from:
right to life
right to liberty
right to property
If self-defense were forbidden, rights would be pointless abstractions.
7. The Right to Voluntary Association (corollary)
This includes:
trade
cooperation
culture
community
contracts
Because humans survive through cooperation, not isolation.
✅ IV. 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).
✅ V. Now: The Big Issue — “Self-Ownership”: True or False?
This is one of the deepest problems 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
control
autonomy
jurisdiction
responsibility
Rothbard used it to assert individual supremacy over their own body and labor.
✅ VI. The Correct Solution
Use a concept that:
✅ preserves the clarity of rights
✅ avoids the metaphysical contradiction
✅ keeps the political force of “self-ownership”
✅ integrates with your moral-agent model
✅ The right concept is:
Self-Sovereignty
Definition:
A moral agent is the sole sovereign authority over their body, mind, actions, and labor.
Self-sovereignty includes:
control
non-interference
jurisdiction
responsibility
agency
autonomy
WITHOUT implying that you “own yourself” as a piece of property.
Self-sovereignty is:
philosophically clean
compatible with Rand
compatible with Rothbard’s political goals
immune to collectivist criticism
consistent with the alien/AI moral-agent model
totally aligned with your system
✅ VII. 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 die.
Rights express the factual conditions required for survival.
No subjectivity.
✅ 2. Rights are universal to all moral agents
This blocks cultural relativism, divine command theory, elitism, and speciesism.
✅ 3. Rights are the only system that prevents the collapse into violence
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.
✅ VIII. Final Consolidated List of Objective Rights
Primary Rights (non-derivative)
Right to Life
Right to Liberty
Right to Property
Right to Self-Sovereignty (self-determination)
Derived Rights
Right to Privacy
Right to Self-Defense
Right to Voluntary Association
Right to Contract
Conditional Rights (contextual, require consent)
Right to Delegated Authority
Right to Reputation (protection against fraud and defamation)