> why not just automatically side with the the smallest minority of all, the individual?
Do I have the right to kill all of the fish in a lake? Presumably not because there are other people who fish in that lake who would be harmed. If there happen to be no other people who want to fish in it right now do I then have the right? Why not? What individual right would I be stepping on?
One way to think of collective rights is that they are simply the rights of at least one individual we can reasonably assume does or will exist but cannot directly point to right now. Yes, the "reasonable assume" part requires judgement.
> Do I have the right to kill all of the fish in a lake? Presumably not because there are other people who fish in that lake who would be harmed. If there happen to be no other people who want to fish in it right now do I then have the right? Why not? What individual right would I be stepping on?
A simple answer about legality might be: "You can kill all of the fish in a lake that you own just as you can kill all of the fish in your fish tank, but not your neighbor's fish tank".
The legal cases in the Industrial Revolution that cropped up were the equivalent of a factory owner dumping poison in a farmer's lake and a judge merely saying to the farmer, "That's progress, sucks to be you". A strict adherence to property rights could have prevented many environmental problems.
PS: I'm obviously not familiar with your life experience and background, but for some reason it doesn't seem like you've encountered much in the way of libertarian style arguments on this before. I'm not here to do the proselytization thing (and I don't even think I'm a libertarian), but for the sake of enhancing your own arguments, I'd highly recommend looking into some libertarian-style environmentalist discussions on Reddit, looking into searches like "free-market environmentalism", or looking into libertarian-esque environmental think tanks like https://www.perc.org/ to gain a better understanding of what you're arguing against.
> One way to think of collective rights is that they are simply the rights of at least one individual we can reasonably assume does or will exist but cannot directly point to right now. Yes, the "reasonable assume" part requires judgement.
If you can come up with a better definition, I'd be open to hear it and noodle it over, but it sounds like there's no objective standard.
I'm sure your intentions are good here, but a hypothetical imaginary person's rights could always end up trumping an actual person's rights. Think about what happened in much of history. There was no objective code of laws and if there was some judge like a king or tribe leader or high priest or something, he just based his decisions on whatever he felt might have been reasonable. It was always seen as a great civilizational progress for humanity to try and codify all laws into a legal system that could be objectively understood. Not sure that what you're arguing for, based on how you described it, is anything but a step backwards.
Do I have the right to kill all of the fish in a lake? Presumably not because there are other people who fish in that lake who would be harmed. If there happen to be no other people who want to fish in it right now do I then have the right? Why not? What individual right would I be stepping on?
One way to think of collective rights is that they are simply the rights of at least one individual we can reasonably assume does or will exist but cannot directly point to right now. Yes, the "reasonable assume" part requires judgement.