To a small extent, I’m playing devil’s advocate with this thread, but the more I think about it, the more convincing it seems to me.
There are no human or natural rights. We say there are…that a person has a natural right, that should be respected by government, to believe what he or she wants, say what he or she wants, raise his or her children the way he or she wants, etc., but in fact, in places where people can believe what they want, say what they want, etc., they can only do so because either the government says they can, or the government is too weak to stop them from doing so. In a country like Afghanistan under the Taliban, for example, women didn’t even have the right to go outside unescorted. It wasn’t until the US, for reasons of our own, used force to overthrow the Taliban, that women got that right.
There are no rights. There’s only power and the exercise of it.
I think what you’re looking for is whether this particular phrase is respected:
“Government derives its power from consent of the governed.”
Certainly in the United States this concept has become embedded in the culture. And because of that we can have the single most powerful man on earth, the Chair of the Joint Chief’s of Staff (in a use of force sense) acknowledge that he is completely subservient to civilian authority.
And that’s a good thing.
You’re right, though, that what we refer to as ‘rights’ come from nothing other than a shared agreement that they exist. There’s no inherent right to anything. Things become ‘rights’ because we, as a society, agree that they should be so.
This kinda relates to the “where do morals come from” thread. In order to communicate with somebody (especially for purposes of an argument/debate) you have to reciprocate with them, and “human rights” are the implicit extension of this reciprocal behavior. You can’t treat somebody as your equal (more or less) when communicating with them and then treat them as your inferior when you deprive them of their life or property or whatever–that’s inconsistent. Basically, by communicating with somebody (and particularly by debating with somebody) you subject yourselves to the Golden Rule, which serves to cover all of our “rights” in a nutshell.
Your view in jurisprudential terms is called “legal positivism”, Captain, the antithesis of the Natural law or Natural Rights school(s). That one’s been going back and forth since the pre-Socratics, probably, and probably always will be.
Nothing social whatsoever exists except in our minds.
Human rights only exist to the extent to which we agree that they do.
Same for the dollar. Same for the United States of America. Same for the English language. You, in a corporeal sense, exist whether we, collectively (including you) agree that you do or not (although the meaning of “you” would sure be up for grabs if we didn’t); the Capitol building down in Washington DC would continue to exist regardless of our belief in it as well. There would be no “Washington DC” in which for it to do its existing however, and its “Capitol-ness”, yea, even many aspects of its “building-ness”, are not inherent in its physical existence but rather in our shared belief systems.
We have belief systems that are not merely shared but are expected to be shared; we’d find the world impossible to live in if we could predict with a very high rate of accuracy what social “truths” are held to be true by the people around us. Therefore, in a very real sense, the fact that we are here as a society rather than as a motley dissociated bunch of noncommunicating individuals means that a solid and dependable social reality is maintained by the energy of our continued beliefs, and our activities that underline them and reinforce their reality.
Some social realities are more susceptible to modification than others–slavery has been excised in the US and being female no longer means that you can’t vote–but all of the changes necessarily involve modifying the shared belief systems in people’s heads. The social institution of “human rights” is fairly well-established and has been growing for some time now, and therefore the inertia is not towards reduction in human rights.
(Nevertheless I find it very reasuring to come here and see that people worry about threats to human rights, especially those wrapped in safety paper and labeled “for your security”)
Human rights grew out of the theory of natural rights to some extent, but human rights and natural rights are not the same thing. IMO, it doesn’t really matter whether you justify human rights based on notions of natural rights, they still exist as standards that the international community has generally agreed on.
Well, Chula, they exist as standards to a certain extent, but governments violate the rights of their citizens all the time, and, for the most part, the international community lets them. There’s no question, in my mind, that it’s better, as an average citizen, to live in a state that believes human rights exist, than in a state that doesn’t.
One of the leading points in the philosophical background to human rights that you bring up for discussion is that for many people, individual rights are guaranteed by the society in consequence of each person’s rights being dependent on his own agreement that every other person shall have the same rights. In short, individual rights are founded on a community consensus of what rights it corporately is willing to concede to itself as a group of individuals, so that one may disagree with the corporate consensus or the majority as regards some particular point in the spectrum of such rights and be considered as having the right to do so.
Polycarp, that idea works fine from the standpoint of the US and western Europe, where we have the idea that everyone is innately equal and that the government is a voluntary and consentual thing. But, lets take the example of a military dictatorship, or territory that has been militarily occupied, where the government is hostile to the population, and the population doesn’t consent to being governed, except out of the fear of death if they resist.
To those people who have argued for a utilitarian argument for the idea of human rights…that I should agree to respect your rights, because it allows me to communicate with you, as loinburger said, what if I have no desire to communicate with you, or debate with you? What if I just want you to obey me?
You can want to fly gracefully through the air like an eagle, but that won’t make you airborne. Obviously, what you’re driving at is “What if I intend on seizing power and forcing you to obey me?” – right?
For the most part, power, like human rights, is a social construct and only exists in our heads. I say “for the most part” because you can tackle me and sit on top of me and grab my wrists and force me to hold the flag that you offer me to hold, whether I concede that you possess power over me or not. But it will be very time-consuming and terribly ineffective for you to do that every time you want to get your way. To get anywhere with it, you’ll need to convince a significant portion of the society of people that you do indeed possess power, so that it becomes a truth in our minds. If this society contains a sizeable number of people who are as stubbornly committed to the notion of human rights as the Indians were when the British were insisting that they held power over them, you may make a lot of people bleed but you won’t get your way and the more ridiculous you look the fewer the people who will follow your orders. People who held positions of authority in the US from the era of the Johnson administration through the Nixon administration discovered that a people who had once granted power were capable of retracting it, too, and even if you call them names and fire upon your own citizens you really only have the power that other people confer upon you in the long run. And those who are capable of conferring it on you are also capable of switching allegiance to those who are bravely resisting you while you’re trying to intimidate them. Ask the Russians about when Boris Yeltsin stood up to the resurgent Communist counterrevolutionaries and how their “army” turned on them.