I never said I knew what was right in all cases, or that I was qualified to determine who should be punished for what. I believe that there are things that are wrong, not that I'm capable of discerning what all of them are. So in practice, our two beliefs work out to roughly the same principle of, "Let other people do what they decide." When I say that people don't have the right to support whoever they want, I am saying that they should expect the appropriate consequences for supporting people who don't deserve that support.
There may be a disconnect between our definitions. I'm referring to the same sort of "right" as people who declare that they have a right to do something, and therefore should be allowed to without any negative consequences. It's not the definition I tend to think in terms of, but it is the definition I tend to see associate with statements like the one I was responding to. I apologize if I was wrong about that.
Principles (we're talking ethics, yes?) are never objective. Period.
Agreed. That is why I said mine aren't.
you don't have a right to support somebody who, say, claims that electricity is a magical health tonic and that therefore everybody ought to be forced to lick electrical outlets for their own good. You certainly are capable of doing so, regardless of what your rights are. But you shouldn't, and it would be perfectly appropriate for you to be punished for doing so (commensurate with the extent of your support, obviously; if all you did was say, "Hey, good idea" you should probably just be called an idiot and that's the extent of the punishment).
I'm unconvinced. On what grounds do I not have the right to support some asinine cause? I'm not asking whether you find it respectable or ridiculous. I am asking by what principle you've decided I have the right to support only those causes which meet your standards.
My principle for this sort of thing is that, generally, somebody has a right to do whatever they want as long as it doesn't objectively cause harm to somebody else (and if it does, you can still argue that there's some more important reason, but you actually do have to argue it). I was trying to pick an example in which there could be no question that it causes objective harm to others (which forced electrical-outlet-licking, in fact, does), and the justification was completely ridiculous.
It's the same basic principle as punishing people for being accessories to a crime, only it includes guidelines for negligible support (negligible punishments, which a legal system can't and shouldn't be bothered to hand out).
Does that make any more sense?