A lot of things fall into the category of "abstract but real". Numbers are a good example. Pi is not something that you can reach out and touch, or see under a microscope, or use to power a car, but it's nonetheless real because you can divide a circle's circumference by its diameter and you'll always get the same number and we have ways to objectively determine exactly what this number is. For a long time, I thought that "rights" (and the closely related concepts of responsibility and property) also fell under this category; there is some disagreement over exactly what rights are, but I attributed this to the lack of a formally agreed-upon definition. I also went along with the idea that the primary purpose of the US Government is (or should be) to protect these rights. I noticed that there were a few situations where the rights-and-responsibilities approach to resolving conflict completely falls apart, but I just kind of shrugged my shoulders and said "well, no system is perfect". Last night, as I was trying to write up an explanation of the relationships between rights, responsibilities, and property (the right to make a decision is inseparable from the responsibility for accepting the positive or negative consequences of that decision; when these decisions are about the use of the product of someone's labor, that product is called property and a monopoly on these rights and responsibilities is called ownership; blah blah), I realized that these things aren't "abstract but real". They're "abstract and imaginary", like the square root of negative one. For those of you who suck at math, negative one doesn't have a square root. You don't have rights, responsibilities, or property. However, we sometimes pretend that negative one does have a square root, which allows us to use it as a placeholder in expressions of very real mathematical concepts. Similarly, although rights don't exist, we can use the word as a placeholder in expressions of very real moral or legal concepts. For example, when I say that you have "the right to bear arms", what I really mean is that you have "the most to gain or lose as a result of decisions regarding your bearing and keeping of arms, and therefore, you should be the one to make all such decisions." With this newfound insight, I'm going to be stripping away the "surface logic" behind libertarian positions on issues to see what really makes them tick and how well the rights-and-responsibilities model simulates the who-has-the-greatest-incentive-to-make-the-right-choices model. Most of the conclusions will be the same, mostly because government never has an incentive to make the right decision. I also won't forget that voters of average intelligence elect politicians of average intelligence, so half of all voters are more qualified to run the lives of politicians than politicians are to run the lives of those voters. With the initiation of force no longer off the table for resolving disputes, however, the biggest differences will probably thrust you into a scary reality in which you are not really the unique and beautiful snowflake that you thought you were, history is written by the victors, and the weight of your opinion is determined more by the gun in your hand than by your logical consistency or ability to cite your sources. These slices of humble pie might be too big for you to swallow. Welcome to libertarianism without rights, responsibilities, or property. Welcome to Humilitarianism.
