If I may politely disagree, I don’t believe there is any necessity (as opposed to practicality) of having someone other than oneself to enforce rights.

There are obviously some benefits to having some sort of small, streamlined authority to enforce those rights (see e.g. Ayn Rand and her disagreement with pure anarcho-capitalism), but it’s nit a necessecitu either for the right to exist or for the right to be exercised.

As I understand it, a right is a right by virtue of its existence and not grounded on any other conditions, meaning that if we believe something is a right, it exists, whether or not we know it exists and whether or not we have any way to currently enforce it.

We could have a totalitarian dictatorship that, after a thousand years of control and propaganda, erases all memory of any rights of individual liberty and quashes any hint of any attempts by anyone to enforce anything even remotely passing for the right to individual liberty.

But would that really mean that because no one knows what the right to individual liberty is and no one has any means to enforce it but by their own actions were they to ever come upon the concept inspire of the totalitarian dictatorship?

I think we can still say that even in that situation the right to individual liberty still exists, because it’s something more than a legal delineation. Rights seem to have their basis in a kind of internal goal possessed by human beings as human beings. They’re necesssrily aspirations tied up with the human condition.

Sure, Bentham would say I’m just babbling nonsense on stilts, but it’s not as if he (or anyone else for that matter) has some better justificstion for their political philosophy of choice, meaning that if there is going to be an unjustified leap over the is-ought gap, why not do it in the name of the basic enduring right of human liberty?