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Notes -
Locke commits the very thing I described as secular view of rights. He flipped the Thomist definition of natural laws on their head, he individualized and privatized the law. Instead of liberty being a positive effect of virtuous and God-fearing community, it is suddenly an entitlement by individual. The community is there to provide the service that the individual is entitled to, if the service is bad, the individual has to file the complaint. It is completely different framing.
In Thomist way of thinking, you yourself were born fallen due to original sin, you are prone to sin and debasement of your dignity. You are free only if you live in a virtuous community as part of the Church. In Lockean view this is subverted. You are entitled to freedom and all your rights from birth, you own it, it is your entitlement bestowed onto you by God or some such. Community can only deprive you of your entitlements, they literally stole what was given to you by God. In fact you as individual are in contract with community, you can judge if the community is worthy of you and renege on that contract if you think that your "rights" - your entitlements are not met. That is what I mean by "absent duty" - you can theoretically start judging the community as soon as you come out from the birth canal and immediately shake your little fists in indignant rage of how bad the community you were born into is. You can do that without lifting a finger or performing any duty.
Of course this does not surprise me, Locke was a protestant. So of course he would turn away from communal to individual - it is for everybody to become their own little god, pronounce ownership/stewardship of their very own god given rights, performing their very own exegesis of what it actually means and then judge the community for not subscribing to their view of morality and everything. In fact Locke encourages this as "right" to revolution - by the way this supposed "right" automatically shows how insufficient his logic is. Right to revolution sounds different from let's say right to property, especially when judging from the lense of duty - so now what, you have duty to accept other people revolting against percieved tyranny? So you will end up in the same fragmentation that you see with protestant church now. Again, it is dangerous change of view from sinful human achieving liberty only if existing as part of virtuous community providing just laws, to individual who is somehow capable of analyzing his God given rights without sin of pride or greed, judging society as sinful and unable to meet his individual yardstick of justice - up until violent revolution for this perceived sin of tyranny.
Which again ties to the original thing: yes, rights exist only as a fiction and they matter only as far as they are enforced. This is doubly so for Lockean rights, where everybody can have their own exegesis of what rights were given to them by god. If they judge the community as morally insufficient, they also have right to revolt or to view other people revolt as infringement on their own rights. This all only proves that even Lockean rights are made up by all individuals, and then only those versions that can be enforced at the point of the gun of revolutionaries matter. Especially if rights are stripped of the whole "given by god" veneer invented by Locke. For secularists, rights are just strongly worded made up laws, or maybe some supposed facts of biology (e.g. it is really "bad" if people suffer, therefore people have right to avoid suffering). This secular transformation of Christian natural law or Lockean fiction is even more obviously made up.
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