This is a great quote. I don’t know if it’s mine, as one commentator implies, but I like it.
Here’s the post of said commentator, “Stephen”:
We’ve had quite a few threads lately that call Natural Rights into question. I stumbled onto this brilliant critique of this skeptical position by Stephan N. Kinsella, which I had read before and forgotten about.
Kinsella:
A third rationalist type of rights argument concerns the very nature of rights themselves and shows how any rights-skeptic contradicts himself whenever he denies that rights exist. It is similar to the estoppel approach outlined above, although the discourse under examination need not involve an aggressor. Instead, this argument focuses on rights-skeptics who deny the existence of rights, rather than on actual criminals who object to being punished in particular instances for a given crime.If any right at all exists, it is a right of A to have or do X without B‘s preventing it; and, therefore, A can legitimately use force against B to enforce the right. A is concerned with the enforceability of his right to X, and this enforceability is all that A requires in order to be secure in his right to X. For a rights-skeptic meaningfully to challenge A‘s asserted right, the skeptic must challenge the enforceability of the right, instead of merely challenging the existence of the right. Nothing else will do. If the skeptic does not deny that A‘s proposed enforcement of his purported right is legitimate, then the skeptic has not denied A‘s right to X, because what it means to have a right is to be able to legitimately enforce it. If the skeptic maintains, then, that A has no right to X, indeed, no rights at all since there are no rights, the skeptic must also maintain that A‘s enforcement of his purported right to X is not justified.
But the problem faced by the skeptic here is that he assumes that enforcement–i.e., the use of force–requires justification. A, however, cares not that the rights-skeptic merely challenges A‘s use of force against B. The rights-skeptic must do more than express his preference that A not enforce his right against B, for such an expression does not attack the legitimacy of A‘s enforcing his right against B. The only way for the skeptic meaningfully to challenge A‘s enforcement action is to acknowlefge that B may use force to prevent A‘s (illegitimate) enforcement action. And here the rights-skeptic (perversely) undercuts his own position, because by recognizing the legitimacy of B‘s use of force against A, the rights-skeptic effectively attributes rights to B himself, the right to not have unjustifiable force used against him. In short, for anyone to meaningfully maintain that A has no rights against B on the grounds that no rights exist, he must effectively attribute rights to B so that B may defend himself against A‘s purportedly unwarranted enforcement action.
More common-sensically, this demonstration points out the inconsistency on the part of a rights-skeptic who engages in discourse about the propriety of rights at all. If there are no rights, then there is no such thing as the justifiable or legitimate use of force, but neither is there such a thing as the unjust use of force. But if there is no unjust use of force, what is it, exactly, that a rights-skeptic is concerned about? If individuals delude themselves into thinking that they have natural rights, and, acting on this assumption, go about enforcing these rights as if they are true, the skeptic has no grounds to complain. To the extent the sceptic complains about people enforcing these illusory rights, he begins to attribute rights to those having force used against them. Any rights-skeptic can only shut up, because he contradicts himself the moment he objects to others’ acting as if they have rights.
And in hilarious footnote 14
Indeed, another way to respond to a rights-skeptic would be to shoot him. If there are no rights, as he maintains, then he cannot object to being shot. So, presumably, any rights-skeptic would change his position and admit there were rights (if only so as to be able to object to being shot), or we would soon have no more rights-skeptics left alive to give us rights-advocates any trouble.
