What Are Human Rights?
On CF we occasionally get into discussion about a particular right; usually in a US context. While we may disagree about the particulars of the right under discussion there’s usually tacit acceptance that the right is real and somehow intrinsic to humanity. While we’ve talked about various individual rights, I can’t recall a thread which looked at rights as a concept.
This is a definition of ‘rights’ taken from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
Rights are entitlements (not) to perform certain actions, or (not) to be in certain states; or entitlements that others (not) perform certain actions or (not) be in certain states.
but this doesn’t help in understanding
why a particular entitlement qualifies as a right.
Amnesty International, uses a more abstract, romanticised definition in talking about
human rights:
The basic freedoms and protections that belong to every single one of us
and goes on to suggest, based on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that all human beings are born with ‘
equal and inalienable rights and fundamental freedoms.’
Human rights is a wide-ranging topic. To give the thread some direction I’ve tried to reduce it to a number of specific questions.:
- Can we objectively determine what constitutes a ‘human right'?
- Are human rights a subset of rights in general?
- Are you born with human rights (that is; are they a ‘natural’ part of human nature) or are they created externally?
- Are human rights really ‘inalienable’? (that is; can’t be taken away)
- Are any human rights universal (that is; apply to all people across all cultures, geography and time?)
Note that this thread is about the broad concept of human rights, It’s not focused on US rights in particular nor is it about justifying, or disagreeing with, a specific right, although mentioning a particular right may be useful in illustrating a point.
A Little Light Reading.
OB
