Where do we get our rights from?

[Amanojack]

These discussions never gain any clarity until we disambiguate what is meant by “rights”. Roderick Long provides the following very useful and salient distinctions:

• Normative rights: the claims that ought to be respected and protected.
• Legal rights: the claims that a given legal institution officially announces it will respect and protect.
• De facto rights: the claims that actually receive respect and protection in a given society.

Normative rights are a question of ethics, and here there are two rough divisions: objective ethics and subjective ethics. Search past threads for more on this.

Legal rights are what Clayton is eloquently expounding here and in his other recent posts:

@ClaytonB

Rights emerge from law. Law emerges from successful dispute resolution via non-violent means. Rights are not determined by anyone. They do not come from a supernatural being and they most especially do not come from government… in fact, government is the rights violator par excellence. Rights (and law) are a lot like language… no one designed it - no one can even change it - yet everybody knows what it is. But just as language can be censored by systematic violence, so can rights be trampled by the systematized rights violator, the State.

See also the last section of Toward a Theory of Empirical Natural Rights, by John Hasnas

De facto rights are what J. Bloom is talking about.