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A thread on human rights.
Recently, I've been following the online conversations of @GreenwoodOutlaw and the various quasi-communist hangers-on he seems to attract. I wanted to make my thoughts on human rights clear from the outset.
Recently, I've been following the online conversations of @GreenwoodOutlaw and the various quasi-communist hangers-on he seems to attract. I wanted to make my thoughts on human rights clear from the outset.
When it comes to human rights as a metaphysical/ethical concept, I reject my belief in them much the same as an atheist rejects belief in God. More than that, I don't think there's any good reason to believe in human rights that do not amount to rank political propaganda.
Whenever I share my views with people, most of the responses amount to "but the Nazis were bad!" As if we need a modern concept to tell us why a genocidal regime's actions are evil! The Fifth Commandment of the Decalogue alone makes clear that industrialized mass murder is evil!
The language of rights is entirely focused on individual self-interest with no regard for the Good. When we focus on what rights we have, we tend to neglect what *is* right. This is the contrast between 'rights' and 'duties', or between subjective right and objective right.
When it comes to the creation of a just society, I believe obtaining objective rights, rights concerned the object or aim of justice being realized, is paramount. For example, a society in which people do not murder or steal from one another is one that achieves objective right.
By contrast, subjective rights inhere in the individual subject or moral agent, in a manner analogous to the way his height or weight inheres in him. It's a kind of moral power to act in certain ways. The moral law permits me a range of actions that it doesn't permit to others.
For example, if I have a right to my car, that entails that I am morally at liberty to drive it or not drive it, paint it or keep it the color it is, sell or lend it, and so on. Others do not have a right to it insofar as they are not at liberty to do these things.
The Left's position on human rights is a bizarre one. They are resistant to the idea of human rights being given a metaphysical/ethical basis, preferring to base them off of political needs. And yet, they believe "the people" *should* have rights.
This makes sense given how leftism's conception of human rights is based on the institutionalist United Nations-derived concept of human rights, which is itself completely incoherent. One Bernie Sanders supporter made the argument that we should just follow their authority.
There are two reasons why I reject this line of thought. First, I am not a member of a religion that treats the United Nations as a moral authority, unlike the Left, who seems to tacitly do so. I'm a Roman Catholic, not an NWO worshipper.
Second, even if I were to treat them as a moral authority, I still think it's important for believers to examine the reasoning and methodology behind the moral authorities. Even if the Church is itself infallible, some moral reasoning by the individual theologians may not be.
When we read the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, we find that their list of human rights are derived neither from God nor any concept of natural law, but neither are they based on positive law; they just exist out in the aether.
Most apologists for the UN explain its adoption as a consequentialist means to an end, this end being the furthering of some cause of "world peace" or "anti-authoritarianism." This is a rather remarkable admission of the intellectual vacuity of human rights
What can account for the existence of such rights? Well, the needs of authority figures. The original creators of human rights made them up in the post-war era to undermine the nation-state in favor of international entities, which would control us to prevent fascism.
The idea was further developed in the 1970s by the US Democratic Party and its UN allies to undermine the legitimacy of Latin-American Dictatorships, communist regimes, and, most important of all, the Nixon administration's foreign policy.
So, we can see in all of this that modern human rights are simply an engineered pretext for institutions like the United Nations to act on their political desires, whatever they happen to be.
Leftists seem to have absorbed this notion of "human rights."
Leftists seem to have absorbed this notion of "human rights."
The older conceptions of rights found in the Lockean Liberal tradition or the Neo-Scholastic tradition, while they can be useful as a pretext for undermining intermediary institutions, at least have some ethical basis beyond "I want it! I want it! I want it!"
This concludes my analysis of human rights as an idea. Special thanks to @CBonduk for being the intellectual source of these ideas. His book "Nemesis" opened my eyes to this.
