Moral And Legal Rights

"These people have no rights in their country, but they should" is a statement that would describe some people's stance on various issues, as would "These people have fewer rights than others, and they deserve just as many."  What they are trying to convey might seem clear, but, depending on what they mean, it might be deeply contradictory, for many people never verbally distinguish between moral and legal rights, and in the aforementioned statements, they might be actively confusing one for the other while treating them as different.  After all, if you already have a moral right, even just one, political recognition of that right is not what grounds its existence or nonexistence.  Someone cannot have a right and not have it at the same time, hence why clarity in communication is vital here, especially since legal rights are on their own nothing but social constructs.

The wording of these statements can be misleading to the point of confusing those who use them, but even if they only believe irrationally because of conscience or cultural conditioning, they still believe that people already have rights by virtue of being human, as arbitrary or even contradictory as the rights they specifically believe in might be.  What they rarely if ever do is clarify if they are talking about moral or legal rights, the latter of which is objectively meaningless if the former does not genuinely exist.  This means that even when they are not espousing something invalid due to contradictions, they are communicating so poorly that their choice of words is irrational in itself if they persist in it.  The difference between moral and legal rights is in no way minor, and it is extremely easy for someone avoiding assumptions to grasp the inherent distinction between them.  One, if it exists, is not a social construct.  The other is nothing but a social construct tied to a specific arbitrary legal system.

No one deserves to have legal rights if they do not already have moral rights irrespective of personal approval, societal recognition, or emotional appeal or persuasion.  In fact, it is impossible to actually prove that these rights do or do not exist while subject to humans limitations, just as it is impossible to prove that a chair one is looking at does or does not exist.  Not even the objectively demonstrable existence of an uncaused cause (which is all that the core concept of God entails by necessity) makes it logically necessary that any obligations exist, without which there are no rights no matter what a political leader or legislator believes or says.  All the same, it is both true and knowable that, say, white and black people deserve equal legal rights if neither has moral rights to begin with, and of course, even if moral rights exist, legal rights are still invalid to the extent that they would go beyond moral rights.

No law is valid because it has a majority of the populace or the governing class in its favor (which is why democracy is intrinsically false as a moral-political philosophy), because it is pragmatically beneficial, or because it aligns with someone's subjective conscience.  Even unanimous agreement of all people in every country that this law is good would only mean that everyone agrees, which they could only do in this case, once again, because of emotionalistic belief or societal pressures/manipulation.  A rationalist, even if he or she finds a given law very personally appealing, can perfectly cling to reason in defiance of their culture and subjective wishes because what does or does not logically follow from something is not a matter of perception, opinion, or convenience, nor is it something inaccessible to all but "the people" or "the ruling class."