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by humanrebar 4679 days ago
The work "inalienable" implies that it's outside the moral authority of culture, society, and government to remove those rights. It doesn't imply that those rights can never be infringed. That is, violating those rights is immoral, not impossible.

In fact, the consensus that rights are infringed proves they exist. This is a correct example of the often misused phrase, "the exception that proves the rule".

But you are right that the specifics of weighing rights against each other are tricky. That's where cultures, governments, and legal systems come in. To be clear, those human organizations do not create inalienable rights, but they are responsible for enforcing them. And a failure to do so would be a moral failure, not an impossibility.