← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Madrid burns
Thread ID: 11532 | Posts: 6 | Started: 2003-12-19
2003-12-19 02:05 | User Profile
Why human rights are wrong
Human rights conflict with the principle of moral autonomy, and form an excuse for oppression. Any harm to others can be justified by claiming that it is intended to respect certain 'rights', even if the victim does not know of their existence.
Full text in: [url]http://web.inter.nl.net/users/Paul.Treanor/human.rights.html[/url]
2003-12-19 04:14 | User Profile
This is a funny essay. It declares that people have the right to denounce rights normally thought of as innate. It is true that one might voluntarily give up all one's rights, in the sense of selling oneself into slavery, but I am not sure what is meant to follow from this.
The essay also asserts that rights do not always have to be 'respected.' This is incredibly vague. If you have a right to property, but I need cross onto your land (marked, 'No Tresspassing') to avoud being killed by a pursuer, there is a sense in which I am not 'respecting' your property rights, but another sense in which I may still respect such rights: for example, I will agree that the land is yours, that I have to get off the land as soon as possible, etc.
The essay also feels that rights are typically 'declared' for us. Sometimes they are, as with the UN. Sometimes they are not, as with the Declaration of Independence.
All in all, a foolish essay. What it actually needs to argue is that it is not always right to take action to enforce other's negative rights, and that there are no positive rights.
2003-12-20 00:43 | User Profile
Thomas Jefferson wrote that men "are endowed by their Creator with inherent and inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness".
That's all well and good, but how do we know for a fact that God gave us these "natural rights" or "human rights", whatever you want to call them?
Maybe this call for "human rights" exists only in the political spectrum, as it certainly could be used as a technique to gain public support. For example, "We're fighting in Iraq to guarantee the human rights of the Iraqi people!" :whstl:
2003-12-23 03:33 | User Profile
Rights are not derived from artificial categories created by materialists.
2003-12-23 08:40 | User Profile
If certain rights are granted by God or otherwise possess a definite metaphysical existence, then that's the end of the argument: rights ought to be respected. If there is no God, or if He isn't involved in human affairs, then we can say that "rights" are merely a mental construct that do not possess any "real" existence. However, if we adopt the latter view, then for the sake of logical consistency we also need to conclude that governments have no right to govern, since governments are merely collections of individuals. Thus, if "rights" don't exist, then neither does authority in any a priori sense, and thus no one is morally obligated to obey anyone else.
In light of the above, it makes sense to define a right as "the absence, in some regard, of legitimate (i.e., morally-binding) authority of one party over another." So, to say that "rights" don't exist is analogous to saying that "holes in the ground" don't exist, since "hole in the ground" is merely a word that refers to the absence of earth in a certain region of the ground. A "right" exists where legitimate authority is absent -- where there's a "hole" in authority, if you will.
It should be noted that "rights" and "power" are two entirely different notions. Just because a party has the power to commit some act, doesn't imply the existence of a (moral) right to commit that act. The reason for this distinction is purely semantic; if we redefine "rights" such that the term is equivalent to "power," then of course we eliminate the distinction between those terms. That's what people do (often inadvertently) when they say, for example, that "Chinese citizens do not have the right to bear arms, but Americans do." In fact, if Americans have the right to bear arms, then so do the Chinese, since if the legitimate authority to regulate firearms doesn't exist in America, then neither does it exist in China. Again: a right is the absence of legitimate authority to coerce in some regard. It is not the mere existence of the ability to coerce or use force; if that were the case, then we could say that a citizen has a "right" to commit mass murder if he can only find a way to do so successfully.
In short, to deny that rights exist is, for better or worse, to adopt a nihilistic worldview that must also reject the existence of authority -- which, paradoxically, affirms that people have the right to do whatever they want to!
2003-12-25 09:40 | User Profile
Where did this "principle of moral autonomy" come from?
Does that have some sort of pedigree, or was that just conjured up from the ether?
Walter