Ian Murray or Wesley Hohfeld:
> Define a right and then a no-right. Please...........seriously.
I define a _right_ as an area of freedom given under some authority. The word derives from Latin _recta_, "things ruled (out)" -- the privileges accorded persons due to their rank. Liberalism provided us with a notion of equal rights, or "liberty under law" as they told me in grade school. In accordance with other intellectual moves of the early modern era, the source of rights was moved from human institutions, traditions, and local and ancestral gods, to God the Supreme Being, hence the supposedly self-evident truth that all men are endowed with certain unalienable rights by the same, and so on. Since sovereign nations are not under any actual law which could be a source of rights, a divine source (perhaps hidden in Nature or, as Nietzsche observed, grammar) is convenient for liberals; the rights of states then can be constructed by abstracting them from the individuals to whom they are granted by their Creator, theoretically with their consent. We can go from there to international law and other performances of structured, legitimated, eventually imperial violence.
However if there is no God, or God is not interested in providing a script for granting, restricting and defining freedom, then sovereign states can have no rights. They exist simply as the result of the exercise of power.
-- Gordon