As a former middle grades teacher, mainly six grade males, I have had to tell them that their rights end where another person’s begin. I have even shown examples to no avail. I believe the lack of accepting this concept is the reason for many fights, even death. So I set out to find what others have said and written about it. No. I did not go to the library, I chose quorum to ask the question. I found that I did not need to ask. Others had already asked and a person named Chris Joossee had responded. I was taken in by it. I thought it should be shared.

It means they don’t occur in a vacuum, they occur in the context of interactions with others equally endowed with those same rights and obligations- and where they conflict, they must have limits.

The whole point to rights in the first place is to mediate conflict between rights-bearing actors, not to stipulate their existence in an abstract state that doesn’t model anyone else existing. If the only way we’re willing to conceive of rights is in abstract, absolute terms that fail to model the contingencies of other people also having rights, we tend to understand them in incomplete, self-serving ways.

This creates a tendency for us to relate to rights in terms of what they get us, without consideration for the responsibilities and obligations that they engender.

As a thought experiment, imagine a land of perfect freedom and natural rights, in which your liberty is absolute, nobody can stop you from exercising it. Now, imagine that there are other people out there in the same perfect land, also endowed with absolute, limitless liberty.

In this land, where everyone is perfectly free from restraint, what happens when my freedom to swing my arm has me swinging it through the space currently occupied by someone else’s nose? Is their claim to a right not to be hit in the nose compatible with my freedom to swing my arm?

If we understand the right-to-swing-my-arm in absolute, limitless terms, no. This must mean that it’s their obligation to take those punches in the face (because my right to swing my arm is sacrosanct, it’s my right). If we consider even briefly, it becomes clear that this model for rights (that I can do the thing I want without regard for consequences to others) creates a sort of tyranny for those upon whom the consequences fall.