What are human rights?

This is a question that's been bothering me for a while. "Human rights" is a ubiquitous concept, but one that is not adequately explained: first, its definition is unclear, and second, its ethical basis is often left unsaid. The best definition I could come up with for "human rights" is "humans deserve things because of their humanity", which raises multiple questions: "why does humanity defer rights?" and "assuming it does, why certain rights and not others?" are the two most readily apparent to me.
So, Tropers: what are human rights? Why or why not do you support this concept? If you support it, what is the philosophical basis? If you don't, why?

Human rights, to me, do not exist independently of human society and culture. At a tautological level, there are no such things as rights; there are only the privileges that we assert with our choices and actions.

My favorite analogy here is what I call the "parable of the bus". If you stand in front of an onrushing bus and assert your right to live, you still die. It's the same counterargument that I make to "subjective reality" folks.

Rights, ethics, morality — these are all social constructs. They exist only to the degree that we believe in them and are meaningful only to the degree that we are willing to enforce them.

edited 21st Oct '16 10:40:24 AM by Fighteer

I had a long typed up post explaining the subject...but...I saw the edit...and...

Did you seriously just compare standing up for human rights to standing up against an inevitable force that will crush you no matter what? Seriously? I...how...what...argle bargle!

I'm not sure how this thread is going to go anywhere but downhill with that analogy standing. You might as well lock the thing now.

Instead of going all Angrish, you can explain why this analogy makes you go Angrish. I'm sure I'll learn a thing or two, at least.

edited 21st Oct '16 11:03:21 AM by desdendelle

What the OP refers to as "human rights" should properly be termed "civil rights" — which, as the name implies, only exist within the framework of civilization. A man who is dying of exposure in the wilderness cannot assert his right to live; nature will not hearken to his cries. Nor can he assert his right to live when he falls victim to a serial murderer, who cares nothing for the laws of society.

Human/Civil Rights only exist where there is a well-defined rule of law that recognizes them and has the power to enforce them. Nor will they protect the stupid from winning the Darwin Award.

That's the thing, though: a lot of people refer to those as two distinct categories.

They are somewhat different.

A civil right is a right granted by a society that you live in. A human right is granted by existing as a human being. Your civil rights may be forfeit if you go from one society to another; your human rights exist 24/7 regardless of what country/society you are currently in.

I'd like to remind everyone that genocide is one of the big things that human rights as a movement is out to prevent. Anything dismissive of human rights (be it because of nature not recognizing human rights, or outright stating that it's futile - both possible readings of Fighteer's parable) is implicitly pro-genocide. I think you get why I was so flabbergasted/angry.

Which goes back to my questions above: why does being human equal people/nature owing you something?

It doesn't, necessarily. We just decided as a society that in civilized society we would confer these rights to all humans because we perceive it as being in our best interests.

Well as organisms in this world, we have rights to try to survive and propagate our species.

edited 21st Oct '16 11:36:10 AM by RAlexa21th

That's a condition (and kind of a strange one too, imo), not a source. Rights don't mean much unless there's someone around to grant or enforce them.

You shouldn't confuse "is" for "should be". I don't believe that human lives have any intrinsic, objective "value", but that doesn't stop me from valuing them anyway.

Indeed. "Human rights" are not intrinsic properties of humanity — I challenge you to dissect a human being and find "rights" inside. They exist only because we say they do and are willing to collectively enforce them.

Calling this attitude "pro-genocide" is a non-sequitur. Genocides happen; we've seen them throughout history. When standing in front of the man who will murder you for your race, color, creed, religion, or simply being in his way, it is useless to cite one's rights as a human, exactly as much as it is to assert one's rights in front of the onrushing bus.

Morality, rights, ethics — these are the collective agreement of humanity, enforced with indoctrination, laws, and violence when needed. It is more accurate to say that the person who chooses not to stand up and decry the genocide, never mind participate in it, is the one who's complicit — "I'm meh on the whole genocide thing, as long as it's happening to people I don't care about."

But again, nature and the laws of physics don't give a damn what we think about our rights. Some silly half-evolved ape stands up in a tree during a storm and screams, "I have a right not to be struck by lightning!"... then wins a Darwin Award, because dying through your own stupidity is a great way to improve the aggregate intelligence of the species. In a few billion years (if not sooner), the Earth will be uninhabitable for life, and if we haven't done something to fix our lot, we'll be dead, rights be damned.

edited 21st Oct '16 1:48:20 PM by Fighteer

That all rather beside the point. Action X might objectively be the paperclip maximizing thing. But me and the bus don't care. But that does not make it just the AI's opinion.

Usually utility maximizers and the like are imagined in an idealize way. Imagine pebble piling robots that make "supreme" piles and scatter "flawed" piles, with bigger piles carrying more weight. But they don't know that supreme works out to prime number of pebbles. So they can't just count.

For small piles they agree easily and can just eyeball them. But for larger piles there can be a lot of arguing. They all have ideas about what makes a pile supreme, and usually stick to their first impression despite knowing how arrangement can effect their reading. But they can be convinced. Someday one of them might arrange a confusing pile as a rectangle, and they might start to catch on.

If there's an answer to what is good, then it won't stop buses, unless the driver cares about good. However the bus continuing doesn't proves anything about good any more than it proves about which numbers are prime.

The right to life is a strong general rule that humans have characteristics that make their continued existence and the act of preserving their lives good, and their deaths and the act of murder bad in basically all cases.

From an outside alien stand point good is just some abstract condition, that some outcomes, action, and character traits have and other don't. But it's not the alien's problem, It's ours.

You are making Darwin cry when you say "half-evolved."

It seems like we are discussing this issue under an atheistic/skeptical context. Many religions say humans attain God-given rights the moment they are born/conceived.

Religious beliefs are perfectly fine, but they aren't necessarily what we should basing our understanding of "rights" on. Most of the governments in the western world are secular, so it's natural to approach these things from that mindset.

"Shrugs"

As Fighteer notes, rights only exist when they are enforced. Nations, for instance, give rights. If a person pulls a gun on me, it is the responsibility of law officers to defend my right to life. In a society-less jungle, there would be no equivalent person to leap to my defense and thus my right to life could not exist.

This is the fundamental failing in the entire concept of "God-given rights". America provides my right to not be assaulted and Americans will defend it, but God has never stepped up to pull a violent maniac off me. How can a right be God-given if God does not enforce it?

edited 21st Oct '16 3:31:41 PM by TobiasDrake

Waving God around as a justification for rights only does you good so long as the bloke on the other end of the gun happens to find that a persuasive argument, or other people who find it persuasive will gang up to stop him from shooting you. And it won't do jack against the bus or the lightning bolt.

edited 21st Oct '16 3:33:46 PM by Fighteer

@RAlexa21th: I'm an agnostic sceptic, so yeah, my questions definitely come from a position where the default is "no God".

Going off that same example, your right to life includes the right to self-defense. So if you get attacked by a criminal and you end up killing him, you won't be charged with murder if the investigation shows that you were acting within your rights.

But once again, this is only in a society where the rule of law dominates. In a lawless region, it's kill or be killed, and whoever survives wins, whether he's morally right or wrong.

edited 21st Oct '16 3:39:42 PM by pwiegle

Er, my personal definition would be "benchmarks for the treatment of individuals that a society must provide if it is decent and just."

What are those benchmarks? What makes them in particular the ones that lead to justice and decency, and not others?

A proper response would probably derail the the thread. But you can just look up the arguments against slavery for an example.

The benchmarks aren't set by anything metaphysical or logically simple. We don't have a real system of moral axioms yet. So they have to be argued on a case by case basis.

edited 21st Oct '16 4:18:32 PM by supermerlin100

...okay, I think I see the issue here.

To illustrate, let me ask Fighteer and Tobias a pointed question. Do either of you two feel like the KKK lynchings and other such activities following the period after the U.S. Civil War were in any way justified? Why or why not?

I'm not them, but:

Legally, I don't believe there was anything protecting black people from those things (or I don't imagine there was, I'm not an expert on american history or anything), so they didn't really have any "rights" they could invoke, in that sense, because they aren't things that exist independently of human contracts.

Morally, it should go without saying that it wasn't justified. The law and what you should or shouldn't do don't always line up but I don't necessarily think that has much to do with the concept of "rights".

edited 21st Oct '16 5:18:43 PM by Draghinazzo