Human rights without an ontological foundation (See Joseph Raz “human rights without foundation”), without a priori logical grounding, are merely conventions or preferences that can be revoked at any time or manipulated without limits. For any human right to have “authority”, not merely by being asserted as such but having the persuasive force of logical necessity, it must be grounded in what it is to be human. This is the angle i have pursued academically for the past 10 years and recently released its comprehensive account in a book.
On the ‘moral realism’ account of human rights, not all claims or assertions of rights need to be regarded as valid and objectively authoritative. Some claims of right are simply false, based on false premises, and can be formally disproven. The rights that are authoritative, which we may call fundamental rights, are not contingent goods but essential properties of humanity, without which humanity is diminished, degraded and ultimately impossible. These kind of rights can be formally proven. As such these rights allow no exceptions, no concessions, because to do so would amount to devaluing one’s own humanity, ones own moral authority, and thus contradicting our human judgement to that effect.
I agree with everything and I particularly like how you said we need a verification of human goods vs rights. I like the distinction there too. You did appeal to a classical conception of human rights though and I feel like that's really where the issue is. Obviously locke appealed to apophatic means to try to maintain freedom when he's talking about rights and that carries over into the US constitution. At that point there's a direct link between literally anything and a human right in the classical sense. There's no way to mediate that within that same conception of human rights. If you speak about human rights in a biological sense, then there exists a standard besides this nebulous "freedom" which really can't be defined in itself as it's ambiguous. You can't make eating rocks a human right in that biological sense where the ability to choose to eat rocks is considered a human right. If it helps at all, the medical system does not run that way. Even if it's under us law, medicine doesn't operate that way and the government has to use a bunch of negatives in order to sustain, again nebulously, our medical system. There's almost no correspondence between human rights in the classical sense and pretty much any institution.
So the issue isn't really about how to return to those classical rights for one because there's a very loose band-aid liberalism appeals to to maintain control and the strength of the institutions themselves determine when liberalism will destroy it. For two we don't have the ethical basis underlying a return to classical liberalism. Even where humans were undoubtedly terrible or even potentially terrible, there was a lack of access. Now you can say that we have developed since then but two of the last big ethical movements that went mainstream very deductively justified genocide etc or were just crazy themselves and had a lot of subjectivity issues as well.
There really are better standards for basing something as a human right. I said biological but there are more fundamental ways to speak about humans as part of a governmental project with differing amounts of values. The question should more be what is a political unit that allows us to actualize and guarantees us higher and higher quality rights, dispositions and maybe "freedom" or however one wants to characterize it. Obviously we can increase our freedom beyond being able to throw rocks at each other or whatever is "natural" or us in nature.
Very nicely done. Erudition lightly worn. Bravo. What I especially like is the consciousness of distinct but not entirely discrete discourses. Responding to the Revolution in France or the Holocaust or today, arguments are in the same key, but . . . and so the problem of specification. The Leibnitz quote is great. Yes, every demonstration is ad hominem, and so in some sense not abstract. We also call that teaching. And of course law is another . . . Would love to read more. Kudos & thanks.
Thanks for great piece on a most urgent topic! I note linguistics and politics aside, the rights discourse in the west has one prominent jigsaw piece missing, without which the discussion remains unfinished.
The piece is Duty. In a society where everybody has tons of rights ("rights run amok") but no duties, who does all the duties? A wise man in the East opined: A duty well performed creates a corresponding right. In this frame, Babelic confusion is kept to the minimum. But this frame requires a restatement of the relationship between Self and Society, which takes us back to the Q: What is Common Good?
Human rights without an ontological foundation (See Joseph Raz “human rights without foundation”), without a priori logical grounding, are merely conventions or preferences that can be revoked at any time or manipulated without limits. For any human right to have “authority”, not merely by being asserted as such but having the persuasive force of logical necessity, it must be grounded in what it is to be human. This is the angle i have pursued academically for the past 10 years and recently released its comprehensive account in a book.
On the ‘moral realism’ account of human rights, not all claims or assertions of rights need to be regarded as valid and objectively authoritative. Some claims of right are simply false, based on false premises, and can be formally disproven. The rights that are authoritative, which we may call fundamental rights, are not contingent goods but essential properties of humanity, without which humanity is diminished, degraded and ultimately impossible. These kind of rights can be formally proven. As such these rights allow no exceptions, no concessions, because to do so would amount to devaluing one’s own humanity, ones own moral authority, and thus contradicting our human judgement to that effect.
I agree with everything and I particularly like how you said we need a verification of human goods vs rights. I like the distinction there too. You did appeal to a classical conception of human rights though and I feel like that's really where the issue is. Obviously locke appealed to apophatic means to try to maintain freedom when he's talking about rights and that carries over into the US constitution. At that point there's a direct link between literally anything and a human right in the classical sense. There's no way to mediate that within that same conception of human rights. If you speak about human rights in a biological sense, then there exists a standard besides this nebulous "freedom" which really can't be defined in itself as it's ambiguous. You can't make eating rocks a human right in that biological sense where the ability to choose to eat rocks is considered a human right. If it helps at all, the medical system does not run that way. Even if it's under us law, medicine doesn't operate that way and the government has to use a bunch of negatives in order to sustain, again nebulously, our medical system. There's almost no correspondence between human rights in the classical sense and pretty much any institution.
So the issue isn't really about how to return to those classical rights for one because there's a very loose band-aid liberalism appeals to to maintain control and the strength of the institutions themselves determine when liberalism will destroy it. For two we don't have the ethical basis underlying a return to classical liberalism. Even where humans were undoubtedly terrible or even potentially terrible, there was a lack of access. Now you can say that we have developed since then but two of the last big ethical movements that went mainstream very deductively justified genocide etc or were just crazy themselves and had a lot of subjectivity issues as well.
There really are better standards for basing something as a human right. I said biological but there are more fundamental ways to speak about humans as part of a governmental project with differing amounts of values. The question should more be what is a political unit that allows us to actualize and guarantees us higher and higher quality rights, dispositions and maybe "freedom" or however one wants to characterize it. Obviously we can increase our freedom beyond being able to throw rocks at each other or whatever is "natural" or us in nature.
Very nicely done. Erudition lightly worn. Bravo. What I especially like is the consciousness of distinct but not entirely discrete discourses. Responding to the Revolution in France or the Holocaust or today, arguments are in the same key, but . . . and so the problem of specification. The Leibnitz quote is great. Yes, every demonstration is ad hominem, and so in some sense not abstract. We also call that teaching. And of course law is another . . . Would love to read more. Kudos & thanks.
Thanks for great piece on a most urgent topic! I note linguistics and politics aside, the rights discourse in the west has one prominent jigsaw piece missing, without which the discussion remains unfinished.
The piece is Duty. In a society where everybody has tons of rights ("rights run amok") but no duties, who does all the duties? A wise man in the East opined: A duty well performed creates a corresponding right. In this frame, Babelic confusion is kept to the minimum. But this frame requires a restatement of the relationship between Self and Society, which takes us back to the Q: What is Common Good?