The basic concept of rights stops making sense if there are no other people. You can't even define rights in the absence of other people.

> If people could unilaterally revoke your rights whenever they became inconvenient, what would be the point of rights at all?

They can and sometimes do.

The point in those cases (i.e. all cases) of rights is that they are a mutually agreed-upon boundary, just as you said.

A right means no one can stop you from doing something you have the right to do or require you to do something you have the right not to. If no one is around, there is still no one who can stop you from doing something you have the right to do nor require you to do something you have the right not to. Your rights are unnecessary, not undefined.

If you are mutually agreeing, by definition it is not unilateral.

> A right means no one can stop you from doing something you have the right to do or require you to do something you have the right not to

Then there is no such thing as a right.

>No one grants you rights, you have them by virtue of simply existing.

Eh, kinda, but it's not that black and white. There's different kinds of rights, which is why the US Declaration of Independence specifically calls out the violation of "unalienable" rights as a reason to justify revolting. Some rights are unalienable, some are granted by authority.

But we don't even have agreement on what the unalienable rights should be, which is why Thomas Jefferson changed "property" to "the pursuit of happiness."

In the end, my unalienable rights are dependent on what other people think my unalienable rights are, which is to say, they are granted by society.

Just because you and a friend don't agree on what a cloud looks like doesn't mean it has no shape.

We may believe some rights that are unalienable aren't, and we may believe some that aren't are, but in either case it is we who are wrong. By definition, they are not granted nor revokeable by society. If society does not recognize an unalienable right as such, it violates it.

Which rights are unalienable and which aren't is not a matter of fact.

That's another of my issues with Rand. Trying to say that morality is true/false or that rights are true/false is the same as religion. It has no basis in reality. You can't prove that people have the right to do anything. It's an issue of opinion.

For example, you may believe people have the right to do anything they want to with their body (ex: refuse a vaccine).

If you take that to its extreme, they also have the right to get sick and cough on someone else.

So Rand (and most people) would say, OK, there's a limit. That person has the right to do anything they want to with their body unless it takes a right away from someone else.

But where do you draw the line? Couldn't you argue that an unvaccinated person might be sick all the time, so going anywhere crowded is inherently immoral and they have lost their right to do that?

It quickly gets very murky and very opinionated.

No one takes away your right to cough on someone else. You voluntarily forego your right to cough on someone else in exchange for everyone else doing the same. The vast majority of sane people recognize that we don't want to live in a world where anyone can inject anything into us that they like without our consent, so one of the requirements for living in our society is respect for bodily autonomy, which for better or worse means we can't force someone to get vaccinated either. You can violate this agreement, but then no one else has to uphold the agreement with you.

Every possible action limits in some way the possible actions of others. Your right to speak limits my right to not have my eardrums vibrated. The social contract negotiates how we choose to handle these conflicts. No one will give up their right to speak in general in exchange for the right to quiet, but most of us are fine with limiting how loudly we speak at certain hours of the night in exchange for the same curtesy.

Different people will have different opinions on how valuable various rights are. I'm fine with google reading my emails, so I'll let them in exchange for providing me a free email client with good tools. Others may value their right to privacy more highly and choose not to forego it for something trivial. In the end we all have a unique set of agreements with other members of society which limit what we can and can't do which we may wish to modify from time to time, there isn't one immutable, homogenous code imposed upon all of us by some vague, abstract entity called society.