My position on rights is one of the basic principles of Objectivism, so you are wrong.Laihendi
Cute. If there was any obviously correct conception of rights, then rights theorists would have all agreed it centuries ago and thus wouldn't continue to be debating it today.
I have a right to live, therefore you do not have a right to murder me. If you murder me that doesn't mean I didn't have a right to live, that just means that you are a criminal thug who violated my right to live.Laihendi
Meanwhile, you seem to be saying that children and people wth mental disorders can't conceptualise their rights to life, and thus you can freely kill them. Is that correct?
*edit* Hell, you also seem to be saying that people who disagree with your conception of the right to life do not enjoy a right to life.
Because rights are not relevant to someone/something that is incapable of even conceiving what it means to have rights. A tree cannot and will not ever be capable of understanding what it means to have rights, therefore a tree has no rights and it is not morally objectionable to cut one down and use it for whatever you will. It has no right to life. The same can be said for most animals. That is why it is not morally objectionable to swat a fly, use sheep for wool, etc.Laihendi
Some questions:
- How do you define 'conceiving of rights'? What's the threshold upon which you suddenly have that right? Do the uneducated or the stupid not have rights? Do people with slightly different conceptions of those rights not enjoy their protection? Do people educated in philosophy, political science and the law have stronger rights than others, since they would theoretically understand rights far better than anyone else?
- Do you have to be constantly coceiving of those rights to be shielded by them? Do sleeping people have rights?
- Are we allowed to conceive of any rights that we like, or is there a set free-standing list somewhere, which we automatically fall under as soon as we recognise the truth of it? If there is a free-standing list, what are they, and how can we possibly all agree on them?
- If we have to conceive of these rights in order to enliven them, do they simply not exist until people have first thought them up? If so, how are they not different from privileges, since they don't exist independently or apply to all humans?
- How can we possibly found a legal system upon concepts of rights that don't come into existence until people think of them, and which don't seem to have an agreed-upon list?
- Also, what distinguishes your rights from a mere set of personal moral principles, if no authority is ever going to adopt or enforce your conception of rights? You can argue the universal truth of them all you want, but that won't have any affect on the real world.
Probably not. 
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