[Jabanga]

>Your personal autonomy is restricted by the government, massively, period, generally for everyone's own good. They decide what and how much medicine you can put in your body. Whether you can gamble, and where, and on what, and how much. What drugs you can take. What speed you can drive. Whether you must go to school or not based on your age. Which food you can buy at the supermarket.

These restrictions violate people's basic rights and are to the material detriment of society at large. The more of a regulatory burden is placed on an industry, the more dysfunctional, bureaucratic and nepotistic it is.

[jpetso]

Basic rights are defined by various charters, constitutions, international agreements, and that's about it. If you find that one of those restrictions contradicts the ones applicable to your country and legal system, you have a good shot at changing it. (Point in case: gay marriage, and other Supreme Court rulings.)

As for all other rights, those are determined by the government that is democratically voted in. If most people, via their elected representatives, decide that you shouldn't be allowed to speed, or smoke crack, and it's not constitutionally guaranteed, then it's not a basic right and it's not your right at all. Maybe moral right, but that depends on highly subjective morals and might therefore still get you into legal trouble.

Best course of action is probably to find a country with a legal framework that matches your morals. If there's no such country, perhaps the time for these ideas hasn't come and you want to lobby for them to be recognized as basic rights, since right now they're obviously not.

[Jabanga]

>Maybe moral right, but that depends on highly subjective morals and might therefore still get you into legal trouble.

We're intelligent human beings. We should be able to arrive at some kind of consensus on what our moral rights our, through rational discourse. That's what I'm trying to do right now. My argument starts with what "the law" means:

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/06/enforci...

[jpetso]

> We should be able to arrive at some kind of consensus on what our moral rights our, through rational discourse.

In the commonly used sense of the term, the scope of morals by far exceeds what you'll get even reasonable people to agree upon. "Rational discourse" means that you need enough of an uncontroversial set of base facts that either party is willing to work with. I don't think we have enough of those to derive a single valid system of morals without injecting other, subjective, more controversial opinions in the process.

Say, you have a basic statement such as "All people should be equal", something that most can agree with. By itself, this isn't actionable, and won't determine how to handle a situation unambiguously. You could come up with a libertarian doctrine that all people should be given the same treatment regardless of their background or current situation, or you could come up with a socialist doctrine that disadvantaged people should get extra support to balance out unequal origins and misfortune. Or anything in between. None of these can be rationally discarded, because there's not enough source data to come to any conclusion to begin with. If you attempt to expand the set of source data, you will find many who disagree with you. That's why it's subjective.

That said, trying to distill what basic facts we do have, so that they can be worked with in a constructive fashion, is a commendable goal. Good luck!

[cheetos]

I truly hope that human drivers' "right" to drive at whatever speed they want is forever trampled by regulatory burden.

[Jabanga]

You do not have a right to speed on public property because others share ownership in it, and thus have a legitimate right to contribute to the rules that govern its use. If you owned your own private track, you would have such a right.

[brett40324]

I second "It's just the way things are".