Rights

Rights are logical consequences of agency and the passive Golden Rule. Start with an agent who can act, and with the rule: "do not do to others what they would not want done to them." Then certain boundaries follow by reason alone. They are limits that other agents must not cross without consent, limits around the body, the property, and the agreements of an agent. A right is one of those boundaries, with a name. Each agent who can reason can find the rights. No power holder and no vote gives them. Rights hold all agents in the same manner: claim a right, and you owe the identical right to each agent like you. Thus an agent who crosses the boundary of a different agent loses the protection of their own. Rights say only the things that other agents must not do to you. Rights do not say the things that they must give to you. A "right" that requires a person, forced, to supply it, breaks the Golden Rule. Thus it is power with the name of a right, not a right. Rights are important only where a crossing is possible.