> That said, countries that follow that principle have not had a tyrant lead them for more than a few years over that period either, while countries where rights come from the state have had tyrants or monarchs. That doesn't really prove anything but if you go into the theory, one system supports centralized power and the other supports decentralized power. Which is better for consolidation and control by a smaller group?

I'm not comfortable relying on continued belief in a conception of rights that I don't think has great grounding in reason, to safeguard against tyranny. At best it seems a slightly-helpful convenience with an uncertain future, useful primarily as a tool of propaganda. That's not nothing, admittedly, and I wouldn't begrudge anyone using it for that purpose.

> Could you make an example? I'd be surprised that someone can be for natural rights and be against say the existence of a right to free expression, for instance.

The simplest thing to point out would be that natural-rights adherents have a tendency (I've noticed) to be hostile to any kind of "positive" right, seeing them, pretty much categorically, as strictly at-odds with capital-R Rights that can be derived from the State of Nature thought experiment (or similar). These positions tend toward incoherence, irrespective of the truth-value of the State of Nature argument itself, in their more mainstream form (supporting e.g. the right to a trial and judgement by one's peers despite that pretty clearly involving some positive rights to other people's time, or that the claim that others cannot choose to give up rights for any reason is itself a positive right) or else, in an effort to maintain coherence, toward reducing anything too close to a "positive" right to a business transaction in order that positive gain might always be voluntary (IMO "voluntary" in this context is on such a sliding scale that here applying as if it were concrete and absolute amounts to sophistry, but that's a whole other topic). This latter at least has some promise so far as its reasoning goes, but I'd prefer to see its application succeed somewhere far away from me before I'd entertain becoming an advocate for it.

Either way, I don't like absolutism regarding Natural Rights which have been granted this elevated status as the outcome of a thought experiment. If we could, hypothetically, somehow, have 99.9% as much liberty to free speech and, as a result, everyone's quality of life would be 10x greater because this minor infringement would enable all sorts of huge benefits, of course I'd be all for that—I'm choosing exaggerated figures and treating these as precisely measurable for ease of illustration, but my point is that I favor treating infringement on what are commonly agreed upon as rights with a high degree of skepticism but not treating them as a suicide pact, as it were... because I simply don't think they're special, and that their utility is what justifies their protection, not the reasoning that led to their selection.

In the end, I'm simply more interested in and find more compelling the conservation or creation of liberties, of all sorts, that make life nicer and more practically free for most people. Whether these are or are not Rights that can be derived from a state-of-nature line of reasoning is of little concern to me. I do think that the sets of rights arrived at by the usual names in that movement are a damn good starting point, however I think that has more to do with the whole thing being an exercise in motivated reasoning than with the thought experiment proving anything fundamentally true about human freedom. I see the derivation from the state of nature as a side-show, and the rights so-arrived-at are what are worth consideration (and acceptance or rejection, either one—I don't think we're obligated to accept them, because, again, I don't think they have some kind of reality [what would that even mean?] beyond what we decide to give them).

> That's true but if that happens it stays a single person contesting slavery with no real basis in ethics. Why do they want to deprive people of their property in contravention of existing rights and laws? Why not have slavery outright, actually, in that case? What's wrong with it? Is it only wrong because the state currently says so? I don't think so - I think it's wrong for a lot of reasons but at its core, a person owns themselves, always. As a result they cannot be fully owned by another.

I do not think natural rights are the only—or even a particularly good, because, again, I judge them to be built on shaky ground—way to arrive at an ethical argument against slavery, so I don't think their absence removes all ethical basis for arguing against slavery.

Actually, this right here lets me illustrate part of my whole point here: "[...] a person owns themselves, always. As a result they cannot be fully owned by another." Great! So why worry about slavery? A person owns themselves, always. Always.

So that right "exists", because someone wrote down an argument from the state of nature that demonstrates that it does. Wonderful. Does that free a single slave? No. Applied as propaganda, perhaps it does. But that "right" "existing" has no power whatsoever to free a single person. Only turned into action, in a relevant context, is it of any value. We choose to manifest it as a kind of reality, but it exists not at all per se.

Let me put it this way: if the state of nature argument had happened to yield that people can be owned and owning people is a right (again, I think the whole thing's motivated reasoning, so this isn't even slightly implausible, IMO, if you put it in the hands of someone who wants that outcome they may find a path that's every bit as solid as, say, Locke's) would we be compelled to accept that? It's a right, so it must be ethical and fine? I say hell no. And I don't think any other rights that fall out of the argument deserve special protection or deference except so far as they're useful and we judge them Good.