I’d like to explore a meta-principle of rights, which I’ll call the Violator’s Implicit Surrender (VIS):
VIS: For a right R that is granted to all individuals, R is implicitly surrendered when an individual violates another individual’s right R.
VIS is similar to the Old Testament maxim of “an eye for an eye,” except that it is a negative prescription: rather than asserting that a murderer must be killed, it asserts that she has surrendered her right not to be. VIS seems to be intuitively accepted by most people, and the idea of retributive justice relies on it. For instance, laws that allow the death penalty for murderers imply that by taking a life, i.e. violating another’s right to life, one has implicitly surrendered one’s own right to life, and therefore can be ethically killed. The VIS principle also explains the lack of similar culpability in the executioner: if the accused has no right to life, no right is violated when she is killed.
In practice, the right that is violated is not always thought to be surrendered, while other rights that aren’t violated may be treated as surrendered. A similar principle seems to be at work, but in a more generalized form. Call the generalized principle VISg
VISg: For any right V in a set of rights {Vr} that is violated, one or more rights S1, S2, …, and Sn in a set of surrenderable rights {Sr} may be deemed forfeited.
We can see that VISg reduces to VIS when {Vr}={Sr} and both contain only one element. But VISg applies to cases where different rights are surrendered than violated, for instance, a thief who is deprived of a right to liberty for violating a right to property.
In practice, some societies have removed rights from any {Sr} regardless of what rights are in {Vr}, e.g. many societies won’t consider the right to life surrendered, even when someone has violated that right. Others, especially historically, make {Sr} much larger than {Vr}, including the right to life in {Sr} for many other crimes. Modern western societies have a very small set of rights in {Sr}, varying the degree to which a violator is deprived of a right rather than varying which right is surrendered.
This latter progression may suggest that VIS is effectively incompatible with modern liberalism. VISg starts to look less and less like VIS where the punishments are narrowed, and more and more rights are retained regardless of the rights violated. This is expected for a social morality that makes rights “inalienable”, which in practice means being immune from (or at least resistant to) implicit surrender.