Rights Are Forged
On Agency, Coercion, and the Ethics of Boundaries
Most people talk about rights as if they were self-evident, eternal, or divinely ordained. “We have the right to free speech.” “You have the right to life.” “Every person has equal rights.” These statements are typically delivered without explanation—because the alternative seems unthinkable.
But in a framework where all value is subjective, and where agency, not metaphysics, grounds moral reality, these assumptions collapse. Rights are not facts about the universe. They are not discovered. They are not granted by society. They are not found in nature.
Rights are preferences we are willing to enforce through coercion, and consider ethical to do so.
They are contingent, agent-relative, and negotiated in the space of potential conflict. They are not truths. They are tactics.
Rights Don’t Come from Nature
Nature doesn’t grant rights. It imposes consequences. There is no right to life in the jungle—only survival. A deer has no “right” not to be eaten. A virus has no “right” to replicate. Rights are not observable in nature; they are absent from its logic.
Every attempt to ground rights in nature imports human preferences into what is, at base, amoral causality.
Rights Don’t Come from God
Invoking a divine source simply defers the problem. If rights are grounded in God's will, they are still preferences—just those of a powerful agent. You might agree or disagree, but you haven’t escaped subjectivity. You've just accepted someone else's hierarchy.
This turns moral realism into theocratic voluntarism, which collapses without belief or revelation.
Rights Don’t Come from Institutions
States codify rights. Courts defend them. Treaties enumerate them. But institutions don’t create rights—any more than a book creates its contents. At best, institutions recognize, enforce, or simulate rights for agents who already claim or contest them.
Rights exist before and beneath legal recognition—as preferences agents are willing to defend.
So Where Do Rights Come From?
Rights arise when an agent treats a preference as important enough to enforce, and others accept that enforcement as ethical.
That enforcement may be:
Personal (e.g. self-defense)
Social (e.g. peer norms)
Institutional (e.g. police, courts)
But what makes it a “right” is not that it is respected. It’s that it is asserted, defended, and justified under coercion.
A right is not what you are owed. A right is what you can defend, and what others agree you may defend.
Equal Rights as a Design, Not a Truth
Sometimes societies agree to distribute rights symmetrically—free speech, due process, property rights, etc. These are policy choices, not metaphysical facts. They reflect mutual restraint, institutional pragmatism, or moral aspirations.
They work well when:
Agents have roughly equal power
Asymmetry creates instability
Coordination matters more than precision
But nothing in the logic of value or agency requires equality. Only local consensus or strategic stability does.
The Unavoidable Role of Coercion
It would be comforting to imagine a world without coercion. A world where everyone agrees, where rights are respected out of reason or empathy alone. But that world does not exist.
There is no stable right without the threat of enforcement.
There is no boundary without the potential for resistance.
There is no liberty without the willingness to protect it.
A right without coercion is a suggestion. A right with coercion is a boundary.
This does not mean coercion is good. It means coercion is structurally necessary in any system that contains real agency, real disagreement, and real stakes.
Conclusion: Rights Are Forged, Not Found
In a world of agents with conflicting values, rights are not granted by nature or institutions. They are constructed, defended, and negotiated. They are preferences, backed by power, endorsed by principle.
You don’t have a right because you are human.
You have a right because you (or others) are willing to make it real.
There is no moral ledger. There is only agency, power, and the ethics of enforcement.