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I think you are asking about balancing tests: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balancing_test

Your rights stop when someone else's rights are infringed. But where exactly do you draw the line? This is a complex and time-dependent question with a case-by-case answer. Right now, the human right to live outweighs the human right to not cover your face. In the EU, the right to privacy prevails the right of companies to serve targeted ads -- although the discussion around legitimate interests is ongoing.

But those are not human rights under the old definition.

Human rights are stuff like the right to dignity, the right of to being compelled to work, the right of not being totured or wrongfully imprisoned.

Humans right are supposed to only include those where you do not need to weight opposing rights. If person A is being tortured that is always a violation of a human right and it is never a violation of a human right not to torture sombody.

Humans right are meant to be a baseline definition of what we must provide to every human on the planet in any situation, whether there is a surplus of food or a worldwide famine, whether we live is a super advance technocracy or a solar flare destroys all electronics.

There are many many rights that are deeply essential in our society that are not human rights

Maybe I'm splitting hairs, but your right to dignity is a violation of my right to free expression, specifically I cannot just call you things.

I could probably come up with a situation for each right that feels absolute.

The right to freedom of expression is actually about protected expressions as an extreme example artistic torture is not a protected form of expression.

I am also reclutant to include it as a human right, the corresponding human right would be "freedom not to be compelled to express" eg freedom not to be forced to profess beliefs you do not want to profess.

Personally I do not believe that screaming at people and relentlessly insulting them is a human right, nor that doing so is necessarily a damage to their dignity so I do not see a contraddiction.

Rights conflict even with themselves. This is even true for rights seen as "negative".

Consider property rights. I rent. My landlord has never stepped foot in the house. The state enforces his property rights. But the way it would do that is by violently evicting me from the property and making me homeless.

You don't have the right to live in someone else's home for free, and so no rights are conflicting.

Why is it somebody else's home when they might have never even seen it? Because the state says so. This is not a natural property of the universe that the state is keeping in place.

The state needs to actively physically move my body in order to protect the property that is owned by somebody else because they wrote a contract. Is that a negative right?

> Why is it somebody else's home when they might have never even seen it?

It’s their home because somebody bought the land, put in the effort to build the home, and then either decided to rent it out or decided to trade it to someone who earned the money to buy the home.

> The state needs to actively physically move my body in order to protect the property that is owned by somebody else because they wrote a contract

No, the state needs to actively physically move your body because you are breaking the contract that you signed by not vacating the home after your lease ends, and in doing so, you are violating the property rights of the homeowner.

This perspective taken to its natural conclusion would imply that homes are built on trees (pun intended, they are made of wood).

> It’s their home because somebody bought the land, put in the effort to build the home, and then either decided to rent it out or decided to trade it to someone who earned the money to buy the home.

Cool.

This then does not cleanly describe a negative right. The state is not preventing some action from being done, ensuring that people have access to the body and possessions as granted by the universe. Instead, it is taking action to change something about the world (I am currently possessing the house) based on an entirely human construct (a contract).

> it is taking action to change something about the world (I am currently possessing the house)

Living in someone's house against their will, and without their contractual agreement, does not a possessor make. The state is preventing theft, essentially. Claiming something that belongs to somebody else as your own is theft. It doesn't matter if what you're stealing is small enough that it fits in your hand, or big enough that you can walk inside it.

> ensuring that people have access to the body and possessions as granted by the universe

If you think it's the universe that built the house and that's why it should be free for anyone to take, that's the core of the problem as I mentioned above. It's like you believe houses grow on trees.

> This then does not cleanly describe a negative right.

The negative right here is that you are not entitled to property. You are not entitled to property, whether land or items, for free. You have to acquire it without breaking other people's right to their property. You have to trade for it (we've invented money as a means of doing this efficiently, so we can work and then trade the money to builders, or the person who previously owned it and hired the builders).

To sum it up: The right to property is a negative right, a "right to property" as a positive right would be government entitlement to some amount of land.

How is that a conflict of rights? You signed a contract that gave you access to the property on certain conditions, and if those conditions aren't met, you have no right to access that property.

Life is much messier than just negotiating rights, so please don't take my dismissal of your conflict of rights argument as a claim that life is a walk in the park.

But the issue that makes it messy is almost always not any conflict of negative rights, which outside of a tiny number of edge cases dealing with the limits of what defines a person's legitimate claims (e.g. the legitimacy of national sovereignty and the rights citizens inherit from that, the co-use of public property like roads and the rules that govern that, and the rules that assign private property rights over what is arguably public property, like private ownership over scarce natural resources) they are nowhere close to conflicting, and can be understood within a consistent moral framework adopted from thousands of years of theological evolution and moral philosophy, culminating in legal and moral principles like substantive due process, and the Golden Rule, respectively.

Under your own definition, everyone can have: - housing - education - health care

Unless you’re saying that somehow it’s impossible for a society like the UK or US to ensure everyone has access to the above?

Even for your “negative rights”, we today already have conflicts. For instance, a right to trial by a jury of your peers: this clearly conflicts with the jury’s right to work. They can’t work while they’re hearing your trial. As soon as you allow “we’ll just dismiss those for whom jury duty is an undue burden”, you’re acknowledging society is big enough to handle these conflicts without creating an undue burden on anyone.

Your right to representation and to a trial by jury are limits on government power, not positive rights. You do not have the right to a lawyer or jury whenever you want. These are the conditions required if the government wants to prosecute you. If these conditions cannot be met the government can just drop the charges against you. We've seen this happen recently during covid due to court backlogs.

> A right is something, theoretically, that everyone can have.

Under this definition, what would you consider a right?

A right of not being condemned without due process, a right to dignity, a rigth to your religious beliefs, a rigth not to be tortured or wronfully imprisoned, a right not to be compelled to work, a right not to be compelled to speak, a right not to be governed by tyrants and a few more.