sorry if you've already answered this somewhere, but how do you counter the argument that "rapists/serial killers etc don't deserve rights bc they violated someone else's rights/what they did was inhuman"?
I know the obvious answer is probably that everyone still deserves rights regardless, but I think there's still some nuance I'm missing maybe? ty, I'm very fascinated by this stuff
Oof, I thought I'd answered this one, I'm sorry. It's so old now!
In essence, them getting their rights taken away is what happens -- but it's through what's called due process of law. People have a right to be free; when they're put in jail, that right is taken away. Due process of law is the part where the government has to justify why it put them in jail.
The 'due process' part is also where the government proves that 1) they were the one that dun it, and 2) that they deserve the rights being taken away as a result. Without that due process, the government can just point at someone and say "that guy, John A Smith, is a rapist! cut his balls off!" and the cops will arrest that guy and a doctor will grab a scalpel and someone will generate appropriate paperwork and nobody will check to make sure they got the correct John A. Smith, much less whether he actually was a rapist.
A very real example of this, right now, is deportation. ICE is deporting people with the most excruciatingly minimal due process of law that I've ever seen, and I promise, "due process" was always pretty fucking basic and janky. (See: my entire series of posts on the legal system.) ICE will just write up a piece of paper that says "This guy sucks and we get to take him out of the country" and when they show it to other legal authorities, those legal authorities are like /shrug, yeah, this looks like legal paperwork, I guess there's nothing we can do. But that guy didn't have a lawyer for that. That guy didn't have someone to advise them of their options. In many cases, no one even translated the paperwork they were intimidated into signing. That's what it looks like to have your rights taken away without due process.
In any society, there's going to be a little bit of taking people's rights away. It's one of the compromises that happens when you have a lot of humans trying to coexist in a network. Due process is, in theory, the thing where you make sure you do it right and fair.
(In practice, it's the enshrining in law of a lot of stupid human biases, thus making it seem right and fair when it is, in fact, on the whole, deeply horrifying.)
Anyway. If you have rights, you have to have a way to take them away, in order to have a functioning civilization. Due process of law involves individual rights in and of itself in order to be a fair process.
