Contrary to popular misconception, invariably spread by the State, ethics aren't just "subjective" so that one person's view is as good as another; and they aren't just whatever the State says they are.

For if this were so, then unprovoked aggression could be a "right", which is ethical nonsense.

We see in here statists often making the claim that rights are whatever a government "democratically" decides. But this must be nonsense. Because according to that theory, if a majority vote for the oppression of a minority, or for slavery, then the escaping slave commits a crime or wrong, and the master who re-captures him is vindicating his "right".

It's nonsense.

We are able to construct a rational ethic in three steps as follows.

A right means a standard of just conduct that you are justified in using force and threats to defend.

1. Everyone has a right to the physical stuff of his own body; without which, any other talk of rights is illusory.

This is axiomatic, because one either agrees, in which case there's no issue. Or one denies it "No one doesn't!" in which case, one performs a self-contradiction by denying that one has the right to participate in the discussion.

Therefore it must be true.

2. Everyone has the right to appropriate unowned goods from nature, and transform it to his own uses, for example, the air we breathe. Again this must be true, because anyone who denies it, performs a self-contradiction, denying his right to enter the argument. So it too must be true.

3. Everyone has the right to engage in voluntary relations with others, without which, the other rights are nugatory. This also is axiomatic, since no-one can deny it, without denying his right to participate in the argument.

That's it. That's all the human rights there are, all the human rights there can be, and all the human rights we need.

How do we know? It's simple. If we have to perform a self-contradiction in order to assert the existence of a right, then it is not and cannot be a 'right'?

There's no such thing as the human right to the efforts of someone else taken without that person's consent because if we affirm that, we affirm the possibility of a right to slavery, which is ethical nonsense, and self-contradictory.

Therefore there is no such thing as a "right" to free ice-cream, or free education, or free housing, paid for by someone else under threat of imprisonment.

Most of what the State calls "rights" are actually in the latter category: assertions of a power to physically attack people in order to force them to obey and submit to having the fruits of their labour taken without their consent.

It is this legal monopoly of coercion which underlies all the state's revenue-getting, all its control of armed forces, all its control of the supply of money and credit, all its control of public spaces such as roads and rivers, all its control of the compulsory indoctrination of children.

Because the State has need of legitimisation - because its entire existence depends on violating the non-aggression principle - it forms a symbiosis with the intellectual class, the intellectual bodyguards of the State.

These make their money preaching that a "right" is whatever the State says it is.

Hence the common and complete confusion over what a right is, which is actually quite simple and easy to understand, once we put aside the clouds of nonsense propagated by the State and its crawling servants, the intellectual class.

In former times they were mainly the clergy, but now they're mainly the academics.

Peter

Notice also that this
a) demonstrates a rational ethic that is internally consistent and consistent with the outside world
b) is not inconsistent with Christianity
c) does not require a specific religion to be valid, but follows from the logic of human action, and
d) supports your critique of what is bad about secular humanism, while supporting what is good about it?