My perspective on what rights are and how they work sometimes has people looking at me like I’m literally the devil. But it’s really not that crazy.

First off, rights aren’t absolute and have to be balanced against each other. Spend an hour or two following along with mundane SCOTUS cases and you’ll see all kinds of examples where two reasonable principles come in conflict with each other and it’s not immediately apparent which one should take precedence. I would actually argue that, if you want to treat principles as absolutes, you only get one, because any two concievable principles can (at least theoretically) come into conflict with each other. You can’t serve two masters.

Moreover, what rights actually are are a theory about maintaining order and keeping people satisfied and content. The theory goes that people were reasonably content in a “state of nature” and that if they become discontent in civilization, it must be because they’re lacking something that they would have naturally had. As a general rule, it works well enough - but viewing it this way means that you’re viewing rights as a means to an end, rather than an end of itself, which is a very important distinction. What that means is that if you’re in a situation where you have to choose between upholding rights and the end goal that rights are meant to achieve, then it makes sense to prioritize that end.

Again, something that makes people look at me like a demon (or call me a “tankie”), but like, there was a point in the Civil War where Abraham Lincoln suspended habeus corpus in response to the genuine, existential threat posed by the Confederacy, and it was probably necessary for him to do so, or at the very least he had good reason to think it was.

The well of discourse on this subject has been poisoned by politicians leveraging imaginary threats for self-interested purposes, and the fact that we in the first world are so used to basic security that we take it for granted. Certainly, there’s plenty of people who say, “The ends justify the means,” but who aren’t really following that principle, they just want to do illegal things for other reasons, like torture being motivated by cruelty, hatred, or revenge but justified on the pretense of extracting information to save lives.

However, just because people use imaginary/exaggerated threats like that, that’s no reason to think real existential threats don’t exist for anyone ever. And when you’re facing a legitimate existential threat, all bets are off, you should give it 100% and do whatever it takes to survive and win. If you’re not prepared to do that, you should give up the fight and walk away. Otherwise, how can you ask others to lay down their lives while you’re pulling your punches, just to feel good about yourself? A guilty conscience is a small price to pay.

Somehow, we’ve got all these people with martyr complexes who have got everything mixed up, that your job as a moral agent is about serving these abstract moral principles as an end to itself, rather than your job being to do the things that lead to the best outcomes and the principles being guidelines that generally, but not always, help you find that course of action. It at least makes sense if you believe following those principles will get you into heaven, but many people still act as though that was their chief concern even without believing in such an afterlife.