Brave man, Andrew, tackling this subject.
Relax, I shall make no original contribution, I promise. I can't.
Roger Scruton can: "... the shared assumption was that rights are liberties. They are there to protect the individual against oppression, and especially oppression wielded by the clergy, the sovereign or the state. Their existence is fundamental to anything that we could call government by consent, and they capture the essence of the political process as we, in the West, have since conceived it – namely as a device for protecting the individual against the group".
Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism by Larry Siedentop – that might help, I can't claim to have read it, but my friend Scott reviewed it.
All very elevated. Back here down on terror firmer, what do we get?
A person is a set of entitlements. Or a set of credentials. Or a fingerprint. Or a mobile phone with a lot of digital certificates and an associated location history. Or, GOV.UK Verify, a person is a credit history.
That, or the Mydex/Ctrl-Shift idea, that a person is a quantified self represented on-line by his or her 100% guaranteed hyper-secure personal data store. That quantified self can have rational decisions made for it by utilitarian apps which process the data in the PDS. Never mind the Enlightenment. Back to the ancient Greeks, when people were pawns in the Titans'/Gods' game of chess.
Just saying ...