What Human Rights?

[Tartarus Sauce]

"If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences."

For those of you that aren't acquainted with sociology, that principle was chalked up by two blokes named W.I. Thomas and D.S. Thomas and hence that statement has rather appropriately been dubbed "The Thomas Theorem." One of its most straightforward applications would be on the topic of race within Western societies. Race, as it has been defined within western societies, is a completely bogus concept of no intrinsic value when it comes to meaningfully categorizing human beings based on biological, intellectual, or social traits. It has however, been meaningfully implemented by societies that perpetuated it's machinations by founding entire social structures on the subjugation and exploitation of underprivileged classes. Race is fake, the consequences of its acceptance and perpetuation have been and continue to be very real.

I think a similar standpoint can be taken when it comes to human rights. "Are human rights real" is a completely separate question to "should we accept and utilize human rights as they are commonly understood," and I would argue that the answers to both questions are independent from one another. This would hark back to Chuck's post several pages back where he described rights as a "beneficial fantasy" and I would be inclined to agree. As David Hume famously demonstrated, what something "is" does not determine what "ought" to be done about it. Even if human rights have no intrinsic meaning, that does not mean they can't be meaningfully implemented by societies at large.