> Having the government prevent you from murdering people is not owning you and is not infringing on your rights. Of course it is! You just don't believe my ex

> Having the government prevent you from murdering people is not owning you and is not infringing on your rights. Of course it is! You just don't believe my exercise of those rights is legitimate, but there's no intrinsically different about the act of shooting someone and the act of riding a bike without a helmet, from a Hobbesian point of view. You can argue that the government/society has a more legitimate interest in limiting exercise of one of those rights, and I'd agree. But when we're talking about what rights should be, you can't use a legal definition of rights. That's circular. > Actually, the government should not be preventing you from murdering others - it is there to mete out justice if you do. And see, this is I think an interesting argument. But it leads to a really perverse system. You can't engage in any form of harm reduction policy, which means the only lever you have to reduce criminal/harmful activity is to have really cruel punishments for the few directly harmful acts. Like take speeding or drinking and driving as obvious examples. Under the "only mete justice if you harm others" approach, you can't criminalize drunk driving or speeding, only vehicular manslaughter, so you either live with more death due to dangerous driving, or you have to like make the punishment for drunk/dangerous driving so terrible that it dissuades people from even engaging in the risky behavior. But in practice, avoiding the circumstances that lead to harm is better for everyone (the victim, the potential perpetrator, society at large) than punishing people after the fact, and there are lots of situations where punishments simply don't work.