RE: What Human Rights?
July 16, 2015 at 1:07 pm
(This post was last modified: July 16, 2015 at 1:09 pm by Dystopia.)
(July 16, 2015 at 12:34 pm)Chuck Wrote:(July 16, 2015 at 8:47 am)Nestor Wrote: It sounds to me like you're saying that you do not believe in human rights . . . But you voted Yes?
For example, the U.N.'s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights states it thus: "Human rights are rights inherent to all human beings, whatever our nationality, place of residence, sex, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, language, or any other status. We are all equally entitled to our human rights without discrimination. These rights are all interrelated, interdependent and indivisible."
i believe inalienable right is a pure fiction which is overall beneficial for the majority to believe.
But you're saying that they're NOT inherent and ARE dependent on custom, legal structure, and brute force?
That's right. It is one thing to recognize something is pure fiction. It is another thing to evaluate whether it is beneficial overall if the majority treated it as if it were real. I think under normal circumstances the society would change in a way that benefit the majority if the majority were to believed certain right were inalienable beyond the vagaries of human institutions, But there are circumstances when such belief could be sharply detrimental to the society, so obviously it is necessary for some to maintain the perspective while other indulge in beneficial fantasy.
Custom and legal structure determine rights, as well as outside foreign policy influences. What determines a right, to be more exact, is mostly what the majority thinks - The law itself is an expression of the general will of the people, so what most people believe to be wrong or right is represented and approved in some sort of Law.
Rights are fictions with real application in our lives because they grant us privileges and duties, honors and hardships - The fundamental law of any country is the constitution or equivalent legally superior text - As long as the constitution allows something, it is perfectly legal, provided that the general will agrees with what's on the constitution.
On a more philosophical note, we all want to live in society but few of us want to get hurt - We all have a need to live peacefully, work, have property, satisfy basic needs - We all make agreements and social contracts with other people with many goals - The existence of Law (Lato sensu) is to prevent conflicts that would arise without the existence of rules to regulate how we interact with each other - But our needs greatly vary and so the Law changes as well. The purpose of rules and Law is to resolve our greatest conflicts with minimum harm to anyone to prevent complete chaos - Hence we created Laws, and quite rationally so. Rights are fictions we accept as necessary granted to us by our agreement with the State (I prefer "state" to "government" as the latter is just a part of the State) according to our needs and how we want to live.
Rights are social constructs as much as many other useful concepts (like "countries" and "territories") and we should make the most out of them. But that doesn't justify the existence of universally inalienable Human Rights - The only way a right can be inalienable is if at any given time a country's constitution says so.
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you