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are we running into the natural law matter again in this thread?
if you imagine there is such a thing as natural law, it would give you something to appeal to in saying there are "rights" which pre-exist any given legal framework. what these are would of course be arbitrary outside a speech community (a group of folk who agreed amongst themselves based on social and likely historical reasons--which often are the same thing, with the former being operative and the latter the same but pushed into the past)....but no matter. you could perhaps imagine a natural "right" to smoke or a natural "right" to this or that.
if you don't buy the notion of natural law, then there's no basis for talking about "rights" except insofar as these are created within the existing legal framework, so by that framework.
i smoked for a while. now i don't (i think). i understood most smoking regulation bars etc. to be about worker health and so i didn't object to them. though i will say that the uk version was more consistent, which is that you can smoke in a pub (or could last i was there) but not within 50 feet or so of the bar because that's where the employees are more likely to congregate.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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