Mr Happy explains why he doesn’t believe in rights as the basis for political philosophy:
All this amounts to saying that politics — the business of living together — cannot be axiomatised. Don’t get me wrong, I think systems of rights are fine things. They set out the values we consider to be particularly important, and provide a framework for arguing about when and how rights should be exercised or violated. But rights are not pre-existent, they are not self-evident, they do not arise as a necessary consequence of humanity. They are things we decide to create, and we can modify them if we choose.