Rights

[morgoth_2005]

I am still waiting for someone to prove the philosophical existence of human rights to me. I accept them as a working concept that I like and can work with but not inherently and not absolutely.

Rights can be of two kinds: religious and irreligious.

The former, then, are those given to us by God. They are handed down to us and we have them, but they

Comments

[traverse]

Hi Andrey, the whole concept of HR is a bit of a mess, to be honest. I would say there is no single way of thinking about rights. I am going to be very simplistic here and leave important bits of the argument out, but it is only possible to claim that human rights "exist" in any meaningful sense if we stipulate some kind of a "natural order" which is both a) what actually is, and b) what ought to be. We talk about rights when we believe that something should be allowed us (some good, or some freedom or non-interference with whatever it is we are doing) even if it is not, as a matter of fact, happening. So, rights serve as justification for the meeting of needs that humans have in order simply to be able to go about their lives, to preserve them but also fulfil their life goals as humans. Our understanding of human life goals affects the specific content of rights. For medieval scholars the paramount right was the right to self-preservation. For example, if you are having breakfast in the morning, you are exercising this right. Having breakfast is what is happening and also what ought to happen in the right order of things. Otherwise you will die young of starvation, and this is both unnatural and bad. :)

God in the picture makes things more interesting. Strictly speaking, He does not have to give us 'rights' (or anything else for that matter). So did He? For some, the very existence of a 'natural order' and of us in it is a proof that He did. Others are not convinced. The issue here is if God gave us any autonomous power to claim something as right and if this power need to be related to a notion of the 'good' to be properly 'right'. In other words, does the exercise of our autonomous power need to be directed to a good end. The prevailing current thinking is to see the exercise of a right as a good in itself - which, of course, is very problematic on many levels.

If however we remove both God and natural law theories from the picture, we enter the territory of mere assertions. What will we base our notions of dignity and humanity on? This means that our concept of humanity and rights will be in constant flux. It's ok according to some, because for them rights are not something that 'exists' but rather something that is 'adjudged' or indeed 'ascribed', they are an activity, rather than property. They 'exist' insofar as we are making them and depend on the imperfections of our collective judgment. The possibilities and dangers here are obvious, of course - the key one is reducing rights to merely positive rights as enshrined in law, which is totally against what HR are supposed to be.

I am not sure if this helped in any way, but feel free to PM me with questions etc.