Quantity limitations on rights are inelegant (what does one Earth year have to do with personhood-in-general?), so there’s that. Even if you frame it as “the right to go uninterfered-with during the course of one murder per year”, that has a heck of a lot of fiddly bits.
It also doesn’t interact with itself very well. Suppose you are trying to murder me, and I’m the first person you’ve tried to murder all year, and I haven’t murdered anyone all year either, so I try to murder you back—am I interfering with you? It sure looks like it, but I’m just exercising my own right… “Right not to be murdered” doesn’t do that sort of self-defeating.
I have other reasons to prefer the “right not to be murdered” version but they are failing to come verbally clear. Something about self-containedness that I’m having trouble explicating.
Quantity limitations on rights are inelegant (what does one Earth year have to do with personhood-in-general?), so there’s that. Even if you frame it as “the right to go uninterfered-with during the course of one murder per year”, that has a heck of a lot of fiddly bits.
It also doesn’t interact with itself very well. Suppose you are trying to murder me, and I’m the first person you’ve tried to murder all year, and I haven’t murdered anyone all year either, so I try to murder you back—am I interfering with you? It sure looks like it, but I’m just exercising my own right… “Right not to be murdered” doesn’t do that sort of self-defeating.
I have other reasons to prefer the “right not to be murdered” version but they are failing to come verbally clear. Something about self-containedness that I’m having trouble explicating.