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One of the best known defenses of the libertarian point of view is Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia. While Nozick does not offer a formal 'proof' for his view of rights, he offers many interesting remarks, including the following. In these passages Nozick refers to "side constraints" on what can be done to people rather than speaking of individual "rights." He is trying to answer this question: What characteristic or characteristics do people have that provides a "basis" for side constraints on what can be done to them.

The traditional proposals for the important individuating characteristic connected with moral constraints are the following: sentient and self-conscious; rational (capable of using abstract concepts, not tied to responses to immediate stimuli); possessing free will; being a moral agent capable of guiding its behavior by moral principles and capable of engaging in mutual limitation of conduct; having a soul. . . . Leaving aside the last on the list, each of them seems insufficient to forge the requisite connection. . . . If a being is capable of choosing autonomously among alternatives, is there some reason to let it do so? Are autonomous choices intrinsically good?

Nozick goes on to hint at his own answer to the question.

So let us add, as an additional feature, the ability to regulate and guide its life in accordance with some overall conception it chooses to accept. Such an overall conception, and knowing how we are doing in terms of it, is important to the kind of goals we formulate for ourselves and the kind of beings we are. . . .

What is the moral importance of this additional ability to form a picture of one's whole life (or at least of significant chunks of it) and to act in terms of some overall conception of the life one wishes to lead? Why not interfere with someone else's shaping of his own life?. . .

I conjecture that the answer is connected with that elusive and difficult notion: the meaning of life.

Reference: From Anarchy, State, and Utopia p. 48-50. Brackets added.