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AllanCrossman comments on Absolute denial for atheists - Less Wrong
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I'm happy enough to accept that people should be spoken of as people. But I can't get my head round the idea that we have a right to the contents of other people's heads being a certain way.
But what does the word right mean to you? To me, it mostly means "the state does or should guarantee this". But I'm guessing that can't be what you have in mind.
Can rights conflict in your understanding of the term? Can you have a right to someone not thinking certain thoughts, while at the same time they have a right to think them anyway?
My use of the word "right" has nothing to do with any political structure. If you have a word that carries less of a poli-sci connotation that otherwise means more or less the same thing (i.e. a fact about a person that imposes obligations on agents that causally interact with that person) then I'll happily switch to reduce confusion, but I haven't run across a more suitable word yet.
My ethical theory is not fully developed. I've only said this on three or four places on the site, so perhaps you missed it. But my first-pass intuition about that is that while people may not have the right to think objectifying thoughts, they do have the right not to be interfered with in thinking them.
Perhaps "moral right" or somesuch.
That seems cumbersome, although maybe in lengthy expositions I could get away with saying "moral right" once, footnoting it, and saying just "right" for the rest of it...