Wait: you are both saying to me that your rights supersede mine where they come into conflict, or inevitably will? I say f--k that noise. Where our rights conflict, a court of law decides, we compromise, or we stay apart. There is no reasonable civilized alternative.
I consider myself a pretty strong civil libertarian, but at the margins where rights conflict you have to have reasonable and agreeable avenues to negotiate or compromise or settle or conflict or oppression results. Someone is going to get **** on if you are 100% absolutist in the observation of your own rights to the impairment of someone else's. This makes you an aggressor and oppressor. You cannot have a civil society without moral, civil, and reasonable individuals and cultural practices.
You both seem to be suggesting that natural and civil and legal rights magically never conflict. If that were true, government would be obsolete and we would be living in a utopian society. Unfortunately because we are individuals with diverse interests, we inevitably come into conflict and there is not always a clear hierarchy of rights in such a conflict. Where your exercise of your rights inflicts ACTUAL harm on someone else, is it still a right at that point? What if such harm is statistically inevitable, or extremely likely given known conditions, but simply hasn't come to its inevitable conclusion? You are ok with tipping over the first domino, knowing it will almost inevitably knock over the last? You are ok risking very likely or near certain and possibly irremunable harm to another in a clear chain of events that will unfold, when it could be prevented, simply because the actual point in time where the harm is inflicted has not yet occurred? I agree that the risk would have to be very clear and to s very high degree of likelihood and the potential harm very great to justify curtailing a natural civil right, but there is a point where you are saying that other people should be put at such risk simply to satisfy your own personal feelings of righteousness on the issue? Are you willing to take it to the ludicrous edge to prove your fidelity to absolutism? Can we put your child or spouse or friend in a room full of psychiatric patients with handguns for 24 hours and test your mettle, for example?
I think nearly everyone has their limit on the issue, and the most extreme of these goes so far towards being willing to allow inevitable harm to others as to being the practical equivalent of allowing or enabling or facilitating that harm. Not everyone agrees to take that caluculated risk you demand they take sovthe most absolutist observation of your right will be observed for everyone. It becomes rather impractical, and you become so grossly outnumbered that you take the real political risk of having that right forcibly removed by the majority mob with no recourse out of fear of your absolutism from a pragmatic standpoint. It's nice to theorize about the ideal, but we live in a practical world, and the courts have long recognized this and placed limits on the absolutist observation of rights where extreme risk of serious conflict and harm arises.
You can be vigilant that that limit doesn't slip regress past what is absolutely necessary, but I don't think the absolutist view can ever practically prevail without nasty conflict.
I wish it were so that our rights were sacrosanct and that we needn't risk any impairment due to the needs or rights of others, but it sometimes isn't so. When rights inevitably conflict, is it just to wait until irremunable yet preventable harm is done, and simply attribute that to bad luck or fate, or privilege of the fortunate or powerful that remain unharmed by the conflict? Is that more just? I agree we should be very vigilant with natural rights and demand their broad and general observation, but I am less sure extreme absolutism is justified where real harm is predicable and preventable at such me minimal level of intervention.
