When you place indefinite qualifiers and exceptions on human rights (not just “no right is absolute”, but adjectives like “significant” or “urgent”), you lose the ability rhetorically to defend those rights against the humans who try to deny those freedoms to you.
We should recall the scope of realization of human rights. In any viewpoint that recognizes any human value, inherent or economic, every human who observes the just law and works as they are able, has the right adequately to be fed. However, in the case of acute natural disaster such as hurricanes, this may not be physically possible for the entirety of the affected population. So the scope of this explanation is not when it is impossible to satisfy the human rights, but rather when it is physically possible (with tradeoffs), and people choose not to.
Consider the mechanical approach: you have a right to freedom of speech, but with exceptions. If you don’t name what those exceptions are, the words couldn’t constrain anyone’s behavior even if they fully would comply with the scope of caveats. Likewise, with the exceptions for “fighting words”/threats, “fire in the crowded theater”, “sedition”. These phrases do not define what threats are and aren’t acceptable, nor what constitutes extreme urgency, or what it means to oppose the state in a patriotic vs. a treasonous way. Counterexamples include:
- Threatening criminal gangs with punishment
- Actually telling people to leave a dangerous area like an overcrowded nightclub, smell of gas, bomb threat, etc. – with the bomb threat being the most extreme, as you often don’t know if the threat is real
- Is it patriotic to oppose Stalin or to work with him? You could argue various options at various points in history, and in the event they all had sizable merits
- Even something like “freedom of the press” doesn’t get you out of the sedition trap, because you never said what distinguishes the freedom of the press vs. the boogeyman of unrestricted speech
The more correct answer would have been to say that “people should be free to express all opinions on political, economic, and social subjects, in any sort of written communication, in any public forum according to the rules of that forum, in any private setting according to the desires of the hosts/owners, and in conversation without badgering and harassment”. You bypass the issue of commands and immediate observations, and you take away the issue of sedition being legal or illegal. With the use of the word “all”, you eliminate the wiggle room. No doubt we could wordsmith and improve on this, but you get the point.
The situation is worse with the right to live without fear of murder, various assaults, robbery, etc. and the right to self-defense in cases of actual and imminent harms. You see this top level statement already uses the word “imminent” which imposes a difficult judgment call, that inevitably will be decided by humans and not by the logical following of text. But focus on the right of self-defense against actual harms or crimes in progress as the proxy. First question: is it an actual harm if you haven’t been touched yet? How badly do you have to be beaten before you can fight back? A world of case law gets rewritten on a regular basis on the topics of castle doctrines, stand your ground, defense against spousal abuse, etc. and so you can never be confident in taking action to protect yourself. Now as to the means: can you carry a gun? If you can carry a gun, under what circumstances? Do you have to relinquish it in a government building? Can you wear body armor? How will you distinguish “legitimate” carrying of guns for self-defense, vs. thugs carrying guns around so they can squeeze off a few rounds in a crowded bar? Is defense against a government that reduces you to second class citizenship, self-defense? (Recall what happened with Germany’s Jews – they were targeted for years before the Holocaust, it didn’t happen all at once.) What about when you believe your government isn’t arming itself sufficiently against foreign threats? (a common occurrence, now that superpowers exist)
The concept of an ordinary citizen reasoning to a consistent and correct conclusion about these dozens of exceptions across the areas in question, and that this conclusion is the same as that which millions of others reach, is quite improbable, and the concept that you are going to give convincing propaganda that conveys the prohibition of law, is absurd. The authorities can pull out exceptions from ambiguity in the same ways as ordinary citizens and legal scholars.
Your only way out of the ad-hoc adjudication of the boundaries is to define the ideal social order and the fallbacks. Onesie-twosie of “you can’t build an arsenal at home” without concrete definitions, returns to the state of lawlessness.