Are Human Rights a fantasy?

[Vambram]

https://breakpoint.org/are-human-rights-a-fantasy/

In a TEDX talk years ago, Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari made the startling claim that human rights do not exist.

[H]uman rights are just like heaven and like God: It’s just a fictional story that we’ve invented and spread around. … It is not a biological reality, just as jellyfish and woodpeckers and ostriches have no rights, Homo sapiens have no rights. … Take a human, cut him open, look inside—you find their blood, and you find the heart and lungs and kidneys, but you don’t find there any rights. The only place you find rights is in the fictional stories that humans have invented and spread around.

Last week, Harari’s talk resurfaced on the site formerly known as Twitter and sparked a lively debate among Tom Holland, author of Dominion; Glen Scrivener, an Anglican priest and author of The Air We Breathe; and Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist who wrote 12 Rules for Life. Scrivener took issue with Harari’s materialism and called his remarks about human rights “nonsense.” Rights are indeed faith-based, he said, but that doesn’t make them any less real.

Tom Holland, who is not a Christian, responded that while he believes in human rights, they are not self-evident. Rather, they require an act of subjective belief. “Human rights have no more objective reality than, say, the Trinity,” wrote Holland. “Both derive from the workings of Christian theology; and both, if they are to be believed in, require people to make a leap of faith.”

Jordan Peterson disagreed, and responded in somewhat jumbled psychological lingo that rights are somehow “built into the structure of human being” and are therefore “[n]ot arbitrary at all.” Holland shot back that if rights really are somehow “built into” reality, it’s awfully strange that the concept of human rights only emerged around the twelfth century in a specifically Christian and Western political context.

The whole exchange was fascinating and instructive. For example, if the idea that human rights are not universal seems strange, that just shows how deeply Western you are. For most of history, as Holland described in his book Dominion, the idea that humans have “self-evident” rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” would have been baffling. “A Roman would have laughed at it.”

 

[essentialsaltes]

Americans have a right to bear arms. People in some other countries do not. The difference lies in the foundational documents and jurisprudence of these places.

Either rights are enumerated as outlined in law, or we are presented with ludicrous (to me) ideas that, for instance, slaves in 1830s America really did have the right to freedom, the right to not be slaves. However, its exercise was curtailed by the government.

 

[public hermit]

Yes, folks like Aristotle had horrible anthropologies in which a concept of human rights would have never developed, and that persisted throughout much of antiquity. But if we allow for Christianity's influence on the concept of human rights, and it did have its influence, the concept never would have developed without the Enlightenment. And even then, it took some time.

Whatever Christian principles might have influenced a concept of human rights were overshadowed by Christian institutions, their hierarchies, the social structures they engendered, and their insistence on correct dogma. I mean, Christians were slaughtering each other up until the primacy of reason began to hold sway. The Enlightenment saved us from ourselves.

Does one need faith in God in order to believe in human rights? No, but it helps to believe in transcendentals like goodness, unity, and justice. That is all the faith one really needs. That and, of course, a unifying form/idea of humanity. In that sense, the groundwork for a concept of human rights has been around since Plato. Peterson should read more philosophy.

 

[Gene2memE]

I agree partially with Holland, but his point that 'rights' emerged around the twelfth century in a specifically Christian and Western political context isn't correct.

Different sets of rights have been enumerated in a bunch of cultures that pre-date Western Christianity.

While certainly not universal human rights as we think of them now, various principles that we'd recognize (freedom of speech, freedom of religion, a right to personal property) were formally laid out in Levantine, Southern European, South Asia, North East Asian cultures preceding the foundation of Christianity.

 

[essentialsaltes]

Different sets of rights have been enumerated in a bunch of cultures that pre-date Western Christianity.

It occurs to me that Roman citizens had particular rights that were not afforded to provincials and other classes of people.

 

[Nithavela]

I think Terry Pratchett wrote it best.

In fact, the argument in the OP is so similiar that I think he might have taken some inspiration.

 

[durangodawood]

....
Either rights are enumerated as outlined in law, or we are presented with ludicrous (to me) ideas that, for instance, slaves in 1830s America really did have the right to freedom, the right to not be slaves. However, its exercise was curtailed by the government.

What if you frame it like: slaves always had the (God given, natural, whatever) right to be free, its just that the US nation didnt recognize that right until.... ?

 

[essentialsaltes]

What if you frame it like: slaves always had the (God given, natural, whatever) right to be free, its just that the US nation didnt recognize that right until.... ?

I guess I feel very Occam's Razor-y about it. If it has no effects, in what sense is it real or existing or an entity?

 

[ThatRobGuy]

Would these rights that people often talk about exist in a natural setting absent some centralized enforcement mechanism?

The way I see it, what we refer to as "rights" are actually more like a series of biological drives and desires that a centralized authority structure has deemed "off limits" from restriction and interference from other individuals. (or in some cases, defining what level of restriction is allowed)

In reality, the only individual "right" that would exist in nature (a more anarchistic environment) would be that of internalized thought (meaning I can think about whatever I want in my head without other people knowing what I'm thinking). Almost every other form of action and expression would come with the risk of consequence and propensity for interference absent some sort of authority structure.


Even within a system of codified "rights" defined by an authority structure, the debate then delves into what are known as negative and positive rights (negative rights being what that oblige inaction, and are Nonrivalrous vs. positive rights which involves someone else to restrict their own behavior or give something up in order for another person to have it)

 

[durangodawood]

I guess I feel very Occam's Razor-y about it. If it has no effects, in what sense is it real or existing or an entity?

We could find effects. I think humans observe a natural inclination to freedom in other people even if we override them in favor of other interests.

 

[Gene2memE]

It occurs to me that Roman citizens had particular rights that were not afforded to provincials and other classes of people.

Yes, and Roman male citizens had different rights to women and children.

 

[Chesterton]

Andrew Breitbart said politics are downstream from culture. I'll take a step back and say culture is downstream from religion. If there is no good God, then yes, political rights are a fantasy.

 

[2PhiloVoid]

https://breakpoint.org/are-human-rights-a-fantasy/

In a TEDX talk years ago, Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari made the startling claim that human rights do not exist.

[H]uman rights are just like heaven and like God: It’s just a fictional story that we’ve invented and spread around. … It is not a biological reality, just as jellyfish and woodpeckers and ostriches have no rights, Homo sapiens have no rights. … Take a human, cut him open, look inside—you find their blood, and you find the heart and lungs and kidneys, but you don’t find there any rights. The only place you find rights is in the fictional stories that humans have invented and spread around.

Last week, Harari’s talk resurfaced on the site formerly known as Twitter and sparked a lively debate among Tom Holland, author of Dominion; Glen Scrivener, an Anglican priest and author of The Air We Breathe; and Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist who wrote 12 Rules for Life. Scrivener took issue with Harari’s materialism and called his remarks about human rights “nonsense.” Rights are indeed faith-based, he said, but that doesn’t make them any less real.

Tom Holland, who is not a Christian, responded that while he believes in human rights, they are not self-evident. Rather, they require an act of subjective belief. “Human rights have no more objective reality than, say, the Trinity,” wrote Holland. “Both derive from the workings of Christian theology; and both, if they are to be believed in, require people to make a leap of faith.”

Jordan Peterson disagreed, and responded in somewhat jumbled psychological lingo that rights are somehow “built into the structure of human being” and are therefore “[n]ot arbitrary at all.” Holland shot back that if rights really are somehow “built into” reality, it’s awfully strange that the concept of human rights only emerged around the twelfth century in a specifically Christian and Western political context.

The whole exchange was fascinating and instructive. For example, if the idea that human rights are not universal seems strange, that just shows how deeply Western you are. For most of history, as Holland described in his book Dominion, the idea that humans have “self-evident” rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” would have been baffling. “A Roman would have laughed at it.”

... and I'm not surprised that Yuval Harari would see Human Rights in the anti-realist, secularized way that he does. It's sad that a gay, Jewish historian of his intellect can't see the crux of the ethical matrix. That crux is placed at the center of Jewish history.

Then again, I guess it's somewhat understandable since a majority of today's Jewish people are agnostic and/or atheist as a holdover outcome of the Holocaust ... the very event that, not so ironically, brought about the current focus on Human Rights in the 20th century.

 

[durangodawood]

Andrew Breitbart said politics are downstream from culture. I'll take a step back and say culture is downstream from religion. If there is no good God, then yes, political rights are a fantasy.

That might be one of the useful things about believing in a higher creator power.

In fact I think we've derived many benefits from such a belief.

 

[Hans Blaster]

Andrew Breitbart said politics are downstream from culture. I'll take a step back and say culture is downstream from religion. If there is no good God, then yes, political rights are a fantasy.

Religion is just another part of culture.

 

[2PhiloVoid]

That might be one of the useful things about believing in a higher creator power.

In fact I think we've derived many benefits from such a belief.

That's what Kant would have said, too. ... (oops. Sorry. I'm not supposed to wax philosophical here).

 

[2PhiloVoid]

Religion is just another part of culture.

That at nice bitf philosophy you have there, Hans. ... maybe consider removing the qualifier to make it true?

 

[ThatRobGuy]

Andrew Breitbart said politics are downstream from culture. I'll take a step back and say culture is downstream from religion. If there is no good God, then yes, political rights are a fantasy.

Even within the framework of religious belief, there are still no "rights" per say in a universal/human sense. It's just a prioritization of some biological drives and desired privileges at the expense of others.

 

[Hans Blaster]

That at nice bitf philosophy you have there, Hans. ... maybe consider removing the qualifier to make it true?

Religion is as equally part of culture as Hip Hop or Mardi Gras. I don't indulge in any of them, though.

 

[2PhiloVoid]

Religion is as equally part of culture as Hip Hop or Mardi Gras. I don't indulge in any of them, though.

... oh Lord, help this one! 'Cuz my typos "just" aren't getting thru ...