Do rights exist?

[rrneck]

7. I would rephrase if I could think of a better way to say it.

I think I would have to assume a right, since I cannot confer it nor prove it exists beyond the evidence given when someone exercises it. For me, and not having given the matter much thought before now, a right is not a social convention or law, but the expression of one's own being. Birds fly, fish swim, and people do whatever it is that people do. Rights do not exist unless they are exercised, and the social conventions that surround them are the result of that exercise.

Rights are attached to actions, and the expectation of action exists in the future.

I don't know if that makes any sense, since I just made it up. The implications lead us to all sorts and kinds of notions regarding a priori goodness and what it means to have certain rights to be one sort of person and not another. But maybe, as we do whatever it is that we do and build social conventions around those actions, the relationship between what we want, what we do, and what we discover doesn't work and declare the wrong thing to do revolve around our relationship between our inner and outer lives. That kind of thinking sorts well with my concepts of form and content in the human experience.