What is a human right? What are human rights? - And how do we define them?

[Iwasamwillbe]

The constant misuse and abuse of the term "human rights" in late 2010s Western society, e.g. the idea being applied to preferred pronouns, has aggravated me to no end, but it has also given me cause to think.

What exactly qualifies as a human right, other than "rights inherent to all human beings, regardless of race, sex, nationality, ethnicity, language, religion, or any other status"?

What is the point in which some desired object or attribute ceases to be a right and becomes a privilege? Do certain people's rights matter more than others.

For example, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as defined by the United Nations, declares freedom of expression a human right, but in practice, in many countries, it is often ignored or interpreted to be a de facto privilege.

Yet in, say, organizations like GATE, gender dysphoria not being considered a mental illness is a human right, and considered gender dysphoria to be a mental illness is a violation of transgender rights.

Where do we draw the line?

 

[CatParty]

 

[HG 400]

I won't trouble you with specious pretences, for you know as well as I do that rights are only in question between equals in power. For there is no natural law but this ; the strong do what they will, and the weak suffer what they must.

 

[ES 148]

Human rights are like human lefts.

 

[NOT Sword Fighter Super]

I've often wondered what the ideal society would allow and not allow.

It seems like too much freedom leads to degeneracy, but too little freedom is stifling.

There must be a balance somewhere, but it'll take a smarter man than I to find what it is.

 

[Cinderblock]

 

[MasterDisaster]

All humans have the right to be offended and can bitch their little heads off until things that offend them are all gone.
Repeat ad naudseam.

 

[Stasi]

 

[wylfım]

Unironically do not exist.
When the enlightenment writers were writing about rights, they were really referring to the rights of the educated, intelligent, aristocrats.
<current year> is what you see when you try handing down complex philosophy to a population of barely-literate peasants that don't understand it.

 

[break these cuffs]

Whatever they are, they don't apply to women or shitskins.

 

[verissimus]

1) My interpretation has always been that human rights is supposed to be synonymous with natural aka unalienable rights, but for some reason, like too many things, the right/conservatives have allowed the Left to not only let them transcribe such to be called "human rights" but also twist and corrupt what those rights should be.

2) As for what those right should be, well I'm going to have to be that guy, but I would defer to Locke's 2nd treatise among other things (you can if I'm not mistaken find a list in Hobbes Leviathan and by one work by Algernon Sidney and so forth). In general the idea was, that they were essentially the rights a person were born with.

3) As for where do we draw the line, generally speaking it was normally drawn where rights didn't interfere with one another though in my opinion that's extraordinarily rare at least looking strictly at what has been considered natural rights. With liberties (a word I rarely see the left use ironically), though it's way more likely they will interfere with other people's rights or liberties.

4) I'm going to make this perfectly clear. "Transgendered" people as "transgendered" people DONT have "transgender rights" just as gay people don't have gay rights. Why? Because privileges are the ones restricted to specific groups of people, not rights. And if that isn't the case, then there's no reason why other groups can't have their own set of "rights". This is what happens when people want to claim everything is relative. You essentially get nihilism.

 

[wylfım]

4) I'm going to make this perfectly clear. "Transgendered" people as "transgendered" people DONT have "transgender rights" just as gay people don't have gay rights. Why? Because privileges are the ones restricted to specific groups of people, not rights. And if that isn't the case, then there's no reason why other groups can't have their own set of "rights". This is what happens when people want to claim everything is relative. You essentially get nihilism.

I can't help but be reminded of the scene in Crime and Punishment where Raskolnikov dreams that a plague infects the whole world and makes them all slaughter each other because they think they are the sole carriers of truth and everyone else is wrong.
A horrifying prophecy.

 

[BoingBoingBoi]

the best book i've read on the subject is James Griffin's On Human Rights. it goes through the history of the concept beginning in the middle ages when people used the term "natural right", though that was intimately tied to christianity. eventually, there arose the secular, enlightenment notion of human rights, which were and are most generally understood as rights we have by virtue of being human, where what it means to be "human" can be cashed out in a variety of different ways, such as being connected to a notion of personhood, to rationality, to being a moral agent, to being a social animal, etc.

an important thing to keep in mind though is that the issue of human rights is an inherently normative question, and not generally a descriptive one. that is, the question, "do we have human rights?" in the sense of all humans having some non-physical object called a "right" which can be demonstrated by science is not really a productive way to think about things, as it's not even clear what would have to be the case to justify this. the "do" in "do we have human rights" instead should be interpreted as "should", so the question becomes "should we have human rights?" or rather, "is it a good idea to universally require us all to respect human rights?" this i think is a much easier question to answer: yes, unambiguously.

as for the scope of human rights, that's a disaster of a question, but a wholly different one. the UN declaration is by no means perfect, but hopefully international collaboration and dialogue will help to improve the situation.

i say my answer is unambiguously "yes" to the question of should we have/respect human rights because of the powers that would seek to destroy them, not just physically but ideologically, chief among them being china. the dialogue on human rights in china regarding the differences between chinese and western philosophy is pretty worrying, as chinese parties, and of course self-hating westerners like daniel bell, are quick to orientalize the confucian tradition as not really needing human rights, which, unlike other forms of philosophizing that are kind of useless, has the effect of legitimizing china's totalitarian control over its population and utter disregard for human rights, which it will absolutely export if it is given the chance to do so.

ninja edit for grammar

 

[verissimus]

@BoingBoingBoi Could have sworn Cicero mentioned something akin to natural rights (without using the term) way back then.

On another note, my other problem with the whole idea of what the Left has done with the idea of "rights" is the lack of personal responsibility with regard to such rights along with the whole idea of "positive rights". For example, claiming medical care is a right which is completely senseless unless the Left meant people should be able to take care of themselves, but of course what they really mean is that those can't afford certain forms of medical care must either be subsidized by the taxpayer or that the government has to regulate the price of such a service. This is what you would describe as a privilege not a right.

 

[BoingBoingBoi]

@BoingBoingBoi Could have sworn Cicero mentioned something akin to natural rights (without using the term) way back then.

On another note, my other problem with the whole idea of what the Left has done with the idea of "rights" is the lack of personal responsibility with regard to such rights along with the whole idea of "positive rights". For example, claiming medical care is a right which is completely senseless unless the Left meant people should be able to take care of themselves, but of course what they really mean is that those can't afford certain forms of medical care must either be subsidized by the taxpayer or that the government has to regulate the price of such a service. This is what you would describe as a privilege not a right.

would be interesting to know more about cicero's role in the development of the history of human rights.

as for your second point, the left surely abuses the term "right", but i'm not sure the medical example is a good example of abuse of the term "human right". leftists regularly make the case that access to affordable medical care is a "right", but most reasonably it would be in the same way that freedom of speech is a "right"---that is, a constitutional right or a right of US citizens. "access to affordable medical care is a human right" seems a point of view reserved for those with an iq around room temperature.

 

[KimCoppolaAficionado]

All human rights are constructs without an objective existence, but generally speaking, I would say that the three ideas most commonly linked to the phrase are:
-The right to not have one's life or health unjustly taken, whether through death, the lash, or bondage.
-The right to make free choices, provided that said choices do not infringe on the rights of others or the health of the public.
-The right to have one's own land and property uninfringed on or taken unjustly.

 

[goku_black]

The implication of a human right; is that you are owed something because you are human and not only that it is ethical, try telling that to North Korea, Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, ISIS, Taliban or Al-Qaeda. The only reason you have the rights; is because of you joining a society or your parents that gave birth to you are a part of that society, society then decides to give you rights and enforce it because you are a part of that society.

what we are really talking about is a right of living defined and enforced by a society not the universal right of living defined and enforced by being human.

 

[The Shadow]

The Left has its chief goal the elimination of all Rights.

It's right there in the name.

 

[1864897514651]

The only rights you have are those that men have died for and secured for you. This is why you have a right to seek Salvation. Jesus died for your sins and secured your right to be forgiven of them—so long as you are truly penitent and contrite. American men—along with a few Frenchies—died in the American Revolution so that we might have liberty from the tyranny of Great Britain. Consequently, we ended up with a Constitution that secured rights for the American people because of the willingness of these men to die for the right of men to be liberated on American soil. It is also why, when you look at the Constitutions of different countries around the world, many people look at our Constitution as something very different and almost sacred. Constitution comes from the Latin, constituere, which essentially means to set a new order in place. In the context of the American Revolution, our men died to set a new order on American soil, and this new order was profoundly different from anything else seen in history.

If we may shift briefly to modern day America, this is why you see faggots cling so desperately to the Stonewall riots, even though nobody died during them. If faggots had even a remote capacity to critically think, they would use the historical realities of Sodom and Gomorrah to support their right to profound sexual perversion, but then they would have to accept that their rights are against God. Anyway, just a brief tangent to explain the origin of all rights, which is God. It is ultimately God, and God alone, Who both permits and forbids certain rights. And sometimes God permits certain rights so that we may be chastised, and also so that we may prove that we love Him.