Religion and Human Rights

I agree with you that what's happening here is a consensual collective 'hallucination' of sorts, but it is due to this very fact that it is useful. I don't know what you mean by an "error". I see no error. If it is agreed upon, and known, then it is correct.

 

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I mean that it doesn't inhere in the person. Once we start talking about these rights as if they are properties of nouns, I think this is an error. It is a problematic reification. Rights are not contained in humans. I don't even think they adhere to them. 'Rights' when you unravel them are patterns in behavior often elsewhere. And they are not positive properties, often. Even a right to an attorney is more a right to not be railroaded by the state because of one's ignorance of the law. Your right is actually something the state must do. It is a promise of actions and inactions by others, especially those acting as the state.

I have a right is really a description of expected behavior of others.

I do not think that just because some people know we are not talking about Natural rights, we are not talking about natural rights. And the language still works to a natural rights conception.

Which is why I am attacking the murder suspect's wording of 'his rights'. Of course I would not in a court of law. I do know how we speak. But I think it is misleading unless one is making a kind of ontological claim I don't think you, for example, are making.

 

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I assume 'useful' here is meant as a value free judgment. IOW not a kind of synonym for 'good' + some functional quality.

 

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I agree completely.
But who are these addle-brained people that think such a thing though?

See, I don't think it's misleading at all.
To me, it's patently obvious; the 'right's you enjoy are entirely contingent upon the particular legislative context within which you find yourself. To believe anything else would simply be delusional. And if one opts for such a state, then one deserves what one thereby gets...

Totally correct.
You know me; I don't believe in such silliness.

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Oh, I definitely think that murderer does. I have heard the way it is said by such people in situ. They do not mean, well, my case should be thrown out. They see themselves as victims. That 'their' rights have been violated, rather than the state has overstepped a limit we made due to our concerns about what habitual patterns of this behavior would lead to....etc. Now the murderer looks absurd in this situation, given the 'rights' they have violated. At the very least the utterance should be said with shame. But I feel like the issue is still present even when an innocent person makes the same utterance. We don't care as much, understandibly, but still I think people still think they 'have rights' and the laws reflect these qualities. Religious people can, of course, get this sense from their religions. But I think secular citizens think in these terms also. In fact they literally 'think in those terms' but further do it metaphorically also.

Note the metaphor you used - a much less common one. Here the rights are around you or happen to you, which I think is closer to reality - dangerous wording, I know. Frankly I think you are naive about how people think. I think even the thread topic and title make this clear. If relgions are violating human rights this heavily implies that rights are one thing, rather than cultural constructions. Otherwise it would be focused on the differences in the conception of rights between religions and secular thought systems or whatever.

You will also here people say things like 'they do not recognize human rights', when in fact 'they' have a different conception of them.

So it is as if the rights exist, but they haven't caught on yet.

You are projecting your own, consistent conception of rights onto other people, I think. Which is kind of sweet of you, given how rational you think this is and how you value rationality but......

 

Glaucon,
look at this from the OP....

Note my bolded portions. Need I say more.

Well, I will say a little more. They are clearly not entitled in the functional definition you are proposing or there would be no need to have such UN proclamations. If by entitled we mean under law. Well, under laws people lack many of the rights the UN thinks they should have. So to me this charter actually means another sense of entitled, and one that you attribute to addled minds.

My second bolded portion, while interestingly placing human 'in' rights, rather than the other way around, clearly is either hallucinating the state of the world OR asserting objective rights.

This is how the thread got started and it was not only earth who was asserting objective rights.

 

I suspect you're right.
I do tend to think that others must think as I do. Then again, I think we all fall prey to that. Nonetheless, your point is taken. What I then find interesting is, how is it that this type of person has become so? Clearly [to me] it's not a 'natural' state of affairs, so there must be some means of inculcation...

Thanks for the compliment.
Again though, I suspect ytou're right. When it comes to 'other minds' and rationality, I suppose I do tend to project too much.
Surprising really, given how much experience I have at being surprised and confused by the oddly irrational behaviour exhibited by other people close to me...
You'd think I would have learned by now eh?

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Glaucon,
I went back through the first half of this thread just to back up my idea about 'other minds' than yours. Here are some quotes.

(names withheld to protect the addled. Actually I believe at least one of these minds is less addled then my own, in general.)

And then the following two quotes spurred an exchange between me and someone.

Eventually this person agreed that there were in fact even overlaps between Saudi Arabia's conceptions of rights and the West's. But the first instinct is not to see things in terms of different conceptions of rights but rather some people getting it and others not getting it. The verb 'recognize', I think, points to objective right conceptions.

 

Interesting stuff there.

Thanks.
Yes, I can now see that someone is very confused.
Suffice it to say that it isn't you....

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"intrinsic" ???**##&!!

LOL

 

And it was four posters other than myself I quoted there. Most of whom when on to make very intelligent arguments but never quite addressed the ontological nature of rights or seemed to really get the issue.

 

After all is said and done, when there are no rights then there is no law. From the consensus I gather there is no law. I hope its not the end of the world.

Merry Christmas folks

 

Interesting. I would say that the converse would be correct.

 

Maybe so, laws enable rights. One of the oldest laws is not to murder. I would think that law was enacted with the victim in mind, establishing a right.

 

I would not say there are no laws. There are laws.

 

Happy Holidays Bells to you and your family!

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...Oh yeah I agree with your post

 

This is an excerpt from Human rights do exist

Here in this article Rand agrees with me, rights are objective. So I'm not confused, I simply disagree with the position rights are subjective.

James Bartholomew, author of the interesting book The Welfare State We’re In, recently argued for the negative in a shocking post entitled “Human rights do not exist”, itself adapted from an article Bartholomew had published in The Daily Express.

Bartholomew’s basic argument is that the concept of rights was developed by political revolutionaries to make people feel justified and virtuous in opposing the existing social order. He cites the French and American Revolutions as prime examples. Here is the crucial section of his post:

So that’s where we got the idea. It was a clever justification for rebelling. You could even call it a kind of ‘spin’. During the French revolution, the rights they were demanding were “Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite!”. But the human rights which people insist exist keep on changing. That, indeed, is one of the reasons for believing that they don’t genuinely exist. Rights under human laws exist, of course. And people create legal rights based on their notions of human rights. But human rights themselves do not exist.

Or, if they do, who created them? Now that our society is secular, nobody claims any more that they were created by God and if they did make such a claim, they would find precious little support for it in the Bible. There the emphasis is on how human beings must be good and worthy of heaven, not how they can demand one thing or another.

Proponents of the idea of human rights think these rights exist independently, without having been invented by us. If so, what is the evidence for their existence? The modern world is meant to be scientific and want proof of things. Where is the proof that human rights exist?

There are a number of dreadful philosophic errors at work here. It is impossible to mount a full defence of rights in the space of a blog post, but I shall try to give the essential aspects. The worst of the errors implicit in Bartholomew’s view is an epistemological one: it relates to the question of what it means for a concept or an idea, such as “rights”, to “exist”. Philosophers call this the “problem of universals”, and it is one of the central issues in philosophy.

Note the alternative Bartholomew offers. Either rights exist “out there” in the world, as a real external thing like a house or an apple, or they do not exist at all: they are simply arbitrary creations designed to serve subjective human purposes, having no factual or scientific validity. This reflects the two main schools of thought in the history of philosophy on the problem of universals.

The first, termed “realism”, is exemplified by Plato of ancient Greece. Plato thought that ideas existed independently of man (hence the term “realism” — this school holds that concepts are real existing things), not in this world but in a higher, supernatural dimension, which he referred to as the world of Forms. We cannot perceive the Forms directly, Plato said, but every human being possesses an eternal soul; this soul existed in the world of Forms before being born into a human body, at which time it forgot all about the Forms. The process of gaining knowledge, for Plato, was a process of remembering what the soul knew before birth, of discovering the concepts which exist in this supernatural dimension. (Religion also falls into this tradition: it is only a small step from Plato to making the highest of the Forms into a being with a personality called God, and turning the world of Forms into heaven.)

The other main school of thought is called “nominalism”, and is exemplified in modern philosophy by thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes. This school holds that concepts do not exist at all independently of man, and that there is no objective basis for them, no facts of reality which justify grouping things together under the heading of a concept. Nominalists point to things like the “borderline case problem” — where does red turn into pink? at what height does a tall man turn into a short one? — as evidence for this view. For a nominalist, any concept or idea is just an arbitrary way of grouping things together; some groupings may be more “convenient” and useful than others, but there is nothing about the things in reality which justify this grouping. Clearly, on the question of rights, this is the way Bartholomew is leaning.
Prior to the twentieth century, the best thinker on the problem of universals was Aristotle: he is essentially a realist, but he holds that concepts do not exist as independent entities in a supernatural dimension but exist in things in this world as common features. For example, there is no supernatural Form called “redness”, existing apart from any red things: there is only the common feature of redness existing in each red thing. If there were no red things, there would be no redness. This view is much better than Plato’s in that it leaves much less room for supernaturalism, but it is vulnerable to many of the same arguments (such as the borderline case argument) and the nominalists have no difficulty in dismissing it.

It was not until the twentieth century that this problem was finally solved, by the Russian-American philosopher Ayn Rand. She identified the split between realism and nominalism as a false alternative. Realism holds that conceptual classifications are facts of reality independent of human consciousness: even for Aristotle, if every mind capable of conceptual-level thought was destroyed, each red thing would still contain a sort of tag saying “this is red”, waiting to be discovered by the next conceptual mind that came along. Nominalism holds that concepts are independent of existence, merely arbitrary creations of the human mind. Rand’s revolutionary view is that concepts are neither independent of existence nor independent of consciousness: instead, they are constructs of human consciousness which act as its tools for understanding reality. They are mental integrations of facts of external reality, as perceived and organised by the human mind.

Concepts, then, are human inventions, constructs of consciousness — but this does not make them subjective. We must classify real particulars on the basis of features which those particulars actually possess in reality, constantly bearing certain guiding principles in mind. (There is a huge amount more to be said about this: even in her book Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, the most comprehensive account of her view of concept formation that she ever wrote, Rand only laid out the basics.)

The conceptual level of consciousness is man’s unique means of survival and is what gives rise to all his distinctive achievements, such as novels, computers, skyscrapers and philosophies. It enables man to live on earth with his unique form and degree of success. Unlike lower forms of consciousness, it does not function automatically: men must exercise choice over its operation. This is what gives rise to the need for philosophy in the first place. When we perceive groups of concretes with similar features, we must decide whether or not to group them together into a concept, and this decision must be made by reference to the sum total of the knowledge we currently possess, including the causal connections between the entities we perceive.

For example, when we perceive a red ball, a red rose, a red road sign, red blood et cetera, and we see the causal significance of colour in our everyday lives (e.g. these red berries are dangerous, red road signs tend to mean danger, red liquid running down my arm means I have cut myself) it is necessary to form a concept like “red” to designate it. By contrast, when I look at my watch, a king’s crown, a planetary orbit, and a ship’s mooring rope tied around a bollard, I see that they all have the common feature of encircling something (my wrist, the king’s head, a star and the bollard), and yet this commonality has no causal importance — it does not lead to any significant common consequences for this group of entities — which is why we do not form a concept such as “encirclist”. (There can be cases where it is optional whether to form a concept or not — see Rand’s book for more details.)

How is any of this relevant to the issue of rights? Rand had strong views on the concept of rights, which she explained in her essay “Man’s Rights” in the collection The Virtue of Selfishness. She defined rights as “moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social context”.

This would include some rights which are widely recognised today, such as the right to life (provided that is taken to mean the right to take those actions necessary to support your life rather than the obligation of others to keep you alive), and its corollaries such as the right to property, the right to free speech, and the right to free association. However, it would exclude others, such as the “right” to taxpayer-funded health care, or the “right” to an education for your child, since these are nothing to do with freedom of action and impose a positive obligation on other people.

For Rand, the purpose of rights is to protect the individual from compulsion by his fellow human beings. (Bartholomew’s view, by contrast, seems to be that rights, if they existed, would be about people “demand[ing] one thing or another” from each other, which, unless the demand is “leave me alone”, is not legitimate.)

One of Rand’s crucial identifications is that concepts are hierarchical, in the sense that there is a certain necessary order to their development. For example, before one can master calculus, one must understand algebra, and before that one must learn arithmetic. The concept of rights also has a place in a hierarchy: it cannot be considered or understood without more basic knowledge. The main prerequisite for an understanding of rights is an understanding of ethics: what is the standard of value by which a man’s actions should be judged? Rand was an advocate of what she called rational egoism, holding that a man should act in his own long-term rational self-interest, and that his proper standard of value is his own human life. (She argued for this, in essence, by examining the hierarchy into which the concept of “value” fits — see her essay “The Objectivist Ethics”.)

It follows that in politics, the principle of human social interactions should be a life-serving one: one which, if followed by each individual under normal human circumstances, would serve each individual’s interests. The primary social requirement of human life is freedom: the freedom to think about how best to serve one’s own interests, and the freedom to act on one’s conclusions, to the extent that others’ equal rights are not violated. Rand argued for this at length, from observation: I refer you to her essays for more details.

Notice how this answers Bartholomew’s criticisms of rights. Because Rand’s views hold man’s life as the standard of value, and the extent to which a principle will serve man’s life is a matter open to scientific and rational inquiry, there is nothing arbitrary, subjective or unscientific about Rand’s ethics, or her politics. Her every prescription is derived from observation of the world, and can be evaluated by observation of the world. Her ethics and politics, therefore, are no less scientific than physics. (Her view that man’s life is the standard is itself objectively and scientifically derived, by inference from perceptual fact.)

Thus, when Bartholomew says that human disagreement about rights means that rights don’t really exist, an Objectivist (Rand called her philosophy Objectivism) would react in the same way as a physicist would if you told her that the fact that people disagree about the fundamental laws of physics means that there are no such laws. Disagreement about a fact does not change the fact. If two men fall off a tall building, the fact that they disagree about the law of gravity does not change the fact that they will both shortly hit the ground and die. So it is with rights: the fact that people disagree about rights does not change the fact that some principles put forward as rights would legitimately serve man’s life, and others would not.

Who created rights? Bartholomew is quite correct to say that the Bible provides no foundation whatsoever for rights: if you arbitrarily claim, as the Bible does, that obedience to and love of God is man’s highest end, there are no grounds for saying that political principles must serve human life here on earth as determined by our best scientific inquiry. All one can say is “My God says you must behave like this, a claim of which I have no rational evidence and which I expect you to accept on faith. Obedience may or may not serve your life and happiness here and now: it will get you to heaven, but I have no proof of that either.” Politically, this cannot lead (and historically never has led) to anything except religious tyranny.

The truth is that man created rights. Rights are creations of human consciousness. But that does not make them arbitrary or subjective. Rights were created for a particular purpose: to serve human life. They can be objectively, scientifically assessed and proved on that basis.

“Proponents of the idea of human rights think these rights exist independently, without having been invented by us,” says Bartholomew. You can now see that he is quite wrong. Rights, in the last analysis, are facts about the external world, as perceived and organised into principles of social interaction by human consciousness. They are meaningless outside their proper context and without the necessary antecedent knowledge. Without human consciousness, there would be no rights: in that sense, rights are an invention. But they are not an arbitrary one: without them, a fully life-serving human society is impossible.

“Where is the proof that human rights exist?” he asks. My answer: compare the United States with North Korea, Britain with Zimbabwe, Canada with Cuba. While no country today is a perfect exemplar of respect for true rights, there are mountains of evidence to demonstrate that the extent to which a country is pro-rights is the extent to which it is pro-life (in the true, rather than the anti-abortion, sense of the term). Rights mean freedom, and freedom means the ability to think, to create values, to trade peacefully with others, and (barring accidents) to live successfully on earth. There is as much proof for the validity of rights as there is for the fact that the earth revolves around the Sun.

 

earth, I suggest you read up on classical logical fallacies.
Your entire post here is ad verecundiam.

And Rand?? Come on. You can do better than that.

In any case, despite your fallacious attempt here, all critiques that have been levied at you have yet to be adequately responded to. It's time to start rethinking your position.

 

by this point you may have reviewed the relevant pages (amongst 20-odd), but to be clear: the sense in which a term is to be intended has been made abundantly clear--by several people here; moreover, earth has even, heh, "defined" objective for us -- pretty much as a freakin' target of a verb (what the hell?).

and so, according to earth's definition:

jack punched a leprechaun ------------------>>>> and therefore, leprechauns are "objectively" real.

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but all of this has been addressed i believe--and it's hardly as though we deciphering linear a or linear b here! i mean, there is more than abundant context to make perfectly clear the sense in which a term is intended. (and i actually took a course in the presocratics from a guy who purportedly had a hand in deciphering one or the other, nearly twenty years ago; though i've often wondered if his claims were somewhat exaggerated.)

anyhow, i'll reiterate my first post--after a long time away from this thread--which seemed to stir up a bout of idiocy (and i'll strip it of some of it's oozing sarcasm):

to which earth responded:

pffffft. can you decipher any of that? i sure as hell can't.

but let's move away from this "lost soul" for a moment and consider these:

"We are entitled to intrinsic rights simply by our nature as human beings. ”

“Evolution entitled human rights. "

"Human rights are universally recognised by the enlightened peoples of the world. Those same people universally recognise certain laws and practices to be a breach of human rights."

"A: Yes. Universal human rights are recognised for all human beings, however. ”
B: By whom? ”
A: By all the enlightened peoples of the world. "


okkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk.

so, am i right?


(oh, and to be clear: i guess these "enlightened peoples" are supposed to be people of the enlightenment (that is the one with a capital "e"; needless to say, i don't feel that it warrants such), not the spiritually enlightened. although, to be honest, i couldn't tell if that "clarification" was intended to be a joke. one would think... well, this is a science forum: there is to be no thinking here!)

 

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ayn rand?! are you freakin' kidding us?