/ Coercion and Force / Desires, Goals, and Maslow's Hierarchy / Human Rights and Civil Rights /
/ Privacy, Secrecy, Surveillance / The Right to Keep and Bear Arms /

attributed to Olver Wendell Holmes
I've seen several different phrasings of this,
and I don't have an exact citation.

This thought is an encapsulization of Rights issues, leading directly into many hotly debated topics:

• Do you have the right to ask me not to swing my fist about wildly, because I'm likely to hit your nose?
  
  
• -- because I'm likely to hit someone else's nose? What if we specify that they can't defend their own rights, because they're underage, or mentally defective, or formally excluded from the legal process, or informally excluded from the legal process?
  
  
• Do non-humans even have "noses" (rights)?
  
  
• How about "my right to create noise ends at your ear." Is that right?
  
  
• Is the pollution produced by my factory a "fist"? Is the quality of your drinking water a "nose"?
  
  
• Is the offensive pornography I produce a "fist"? Your wish not to encounter it a "nose"?
  Your wish not to have your children encounter it?
  
  
• My use of dangerous drugs?
  
  
• My behavior with consenting adults in the privacy of my own home?
  
  
• My behavior with consenting adults if I discuss it on TV? On my Web site? In a book?
  
  
• The picture I tack to the wall of my cubicle?
  
  
• The music I listen to?
  
  
• The way I express myself in non-inclusive language?
  
  
  
  

• Nonsense On Stilts
  
  
• In Human Nature, Anarchy, and Capitalism, Kelley Ross refers to a correspondence with John Olmsted:
  
  
  

I'm not trying to go that far. All I'm saying is: "People are not adequately good."



• FAQ on (the initiation of) force from capitalism.org, a very party-line Objectivist site.
  
  
• Freedom or Power?
  by Bradley M. Kuhn and Richard Stallman
  08/15/2001
  Editor's note: On July 28, 2001, Tim O'Reilly published a weblog titled My Definition of Freedom Zero, that was inspired by a discussion that had followed the debate between Craig Mundie and Michael Tiemann at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention. In that article Tim explained his preferences for BSD-style licenses over the GPL. This article is a response by the Free Software Movement to Tim's statements.

  "Editor" in the above is the editor of the original posting of this letter on O'Reilly Network.
  Links are as they appear in the original.

  "Freedom is being able to make decisions that affect mainly you. Power is being able to make decisions that affect others more than you. If we confuse power with freedom, we will fail to uphold real freedom."

  
  
  
  
• The Forgotten Essentials of Jefferson's Philosophy
  by David N. Mayer
  

  "In an 1816 letter, Jefferson observed: 'No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another; and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him; every man is under the natural duty of contributing to the necessities of society; and this is all the laws should enforce on him; and, no man having a natural right to be the judge between himself and another, it is his natural duty to submit to the umpirage of an impartial third'. "

  
  
  
  
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