As a first pass at a definition, anything you could do in the absence of any other people stopping you from doing it could be considered a "natural right."
That's not superstitious or handwavy, and I didn't have to belittle my audience to express it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_and_legal_rights#Conte...
> Contemporary political philosophies continuing the liberal tradition of natural rights include libertarianism, anarcho-capitalism and Objectivism, and include amongst their canon the works of authors such as Robert Nozick, Ludwig von Mises, Ayn Rand, and Murray Rothbard.
As far as I'm concerned:
legal rights : natural rights :: laws : moralsBut, natural rights are in the same category as human rights, and there are many human rights that I value despite their nonexistence as laws.
It seems to me that natural rights are often a covert argument for male supremacy over women and children. A man is stronger than a woman, therefore he has a natural right to dominate her. The same goes for children. A child has no right to anything from its parents, because if you must depend on someone else, you wouldn't be free to obtain it in the absence of other people.
But dependence is how we are born into the world. Education is given to us while we are in a state of dependence. Is it really only that educators have the right to educate? Perhaps, if you really don't believe in assigning rights on the basis of need.
In the libertarian mindset, it's almost as if the government represents one's parents, and the romanticized state of being alone in the wild represents freedom from one's parents. Actually I believe that it's next to impossible for anybody arguing for an extreme position like anarcho-capitalism in the typical cult-like manner that we see to be reasonable, because doing so would require making the connection from what they're proselytizing to their own lives and processing their own feelings about authority.
I don't believe in "natural rights", nor do I believe concept has any real value. That said, you're misconstruing their argument.
Someone who believes in natural rights would say:
> You have a right to own property, but you aren't entitled to be given property. Similarly, you have the right to get an education, but you aren't entitled to be given an education.
But you only have a right to profit insofar as you can keep others from exercising their freedom to steal your ideas (or anything else).
Well, maybe I didn't realize it though since I don't spend much time thinking about my freedoms in the state of nature, and people were making all these arguments about physical property being a natural right.