When Do We Acquire Our Four Natural Rights?

 Yes, four rights.  The moral code given in these posts in the past referred to "Honoring the equal rights of all to their life, liberty and property, to be free from violation through force or fraud".  It was brought to my attention lately that self-defense was an exception to the universality of the code, to which I replied that it was part of the code, which is true, it just hadn't been included as it should be.  So:

Morality is honoring the equal rights of all to their life, liberty, property and self-defense, to be free from violation  through force or fraud.

Self-defense is a right which should be included with the other three--life, liberty and property. I'm surprised Locke, Jefferson and Paine didn't include it way back then, or that it took so long here. When someone breaks the absolute moral code by violating the rights of another, he nullifies any protection of his rights.

It is that simple, but that doesn't mean there aren't any special cases (exceptions?) that put the code to the test on that given issue. There is one such issue like that which I can think of and that's abortion, because it deals with the rights of two individuals and when it is that we acquire our rights. That extends to the question of when children, after they're born, acquire their rights. Certainly a child doesn't have the right to liberty and property at birth. And when does an embryo acquire the right to life?

The issue of rights acquisition is problematic and doesn't have universally pat answers, but these questions still don't apply to the overarching and vast universality of the rights of adults. I think we can see why we can't veer off into this every time the subject of rights comes up. It's a relatively small portion of rights issues, and, except for abortion, we're in overwhelming agreement. If we weren't we'd be having people claiming that children have the right to go play in traffic, or that we're immorally locking babies up when we put them in a playpen.