This idea isn’t coming out of nowhere. It pulls together a few well-established moral intuitions and puts them into a clearer order.
First, rights aren’t just abstract moral wishes. A right only really exists if it can be asserted or defended—either through physical resistance or through communication that makes others recognize and respect it. This echoes thinkers like Joel Feinberg, who argued that a right is something you can stand on, not just something others generously grant you.
Second, moral consideration tends to grow with a being’s capacity to experience and express interests. We already live this way. We protect conscious humans more than embryos, pets more than insects, mammals more than microbes—not because life doesn’t matter, but because sentience, pain, and communication matter. That’s the intuition behind interest-based ethics and the idea of an expanding moral circle, often associated with Peter Singer.
What this thinking adds is a clear hierarchy: The first ethical value is the ability of a life (we can bring up ecosystems and AI agents later) to defend its right to exist, whether by force or by communication that generates recognition, restraint, or empathy.
The second ethical value is the ability to cooperate for mutual benefit, allowing life not just to survive, but to flourish within a shared environment.
When rights conflict, they aren’t treated as absolute. They’re weighed. Greater consciousness and communicative capacity take precedence—not because power makes right, but because awareness and expression are what allow rights to function at all.
In short: Rights aren’t magic. They become real through defense. Defense doesn’t have to mean violence. Communication and empathy can be forms of protection. And cooperation is what comes next—once existence itself is secured.
Seen this way, the right to self-defense—including armed defense—is not an end in itself, but a safeguard meant to preserve the conditions under which cooperation, law, and mutual restraint can exist.
This way of thinking also sheds light on why societies have historically protected the right of self-defense, including the controversial case of firearms. The Second Amendment, as originally understood, was not about isolated individuals stockpiling power, but about collective, cooperative defense—citizens organized to protect themselves and their communities when centralized authority failed or overreached.
In that sense, weapons are not moral claims in themselves; they are tools for defending rights when communication and institutions break down. But because force carries real risk, it only retains legitimacy when embedded in shared responsibility, restraint, and coordination with others. Defense comes first—but cooperation is what keeps defense from becoming domination.
