What are human rights?

@Quag: "other people do it" doesn't make an argument good, it just means the argument is popular.

@Fighteer

At no point did I claim that we were designed to do this, or that we didn't evolve. And I acknowledged repeatedly that it might just not be the case for humans and morality. The main point is that there is a theoretical way for morality to be objective.

If less subjective means bland. I mean we might expect that to be a common goal throughout the universe. But that's not a reason for or against it. Heck spreading life, doesn't even seem fundamental. There are reasons to do it, but it hardly seems like an axiom.

I never said it was an axiom, just that it's one that could be justified on a "natural" basis and one that is subject to empirical measurements of success.

edited 26th Oct '16 1:53:06 PM by Fighteer

So....if we assume there's some sort of moral Natural Law (whatever that means)...is it susceptible to the Naturalistic Fallacy? Or would it be a divide-by-0 scenario and make our heads explode.

edited 26th Oct '16 2:44:05 PM by nightwyrm_zero

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_fallacy

Notable phrase: We can have no certain knowledge of morality from them, being incapable of deducing how things ought to be from the fact that they happen to be arranged in a particular manner in experience.

This is precisely the point I'm making. The real world doesn't do Divide by Zero. It just is. Human beings come along and attempt to deduce or imagine how it ought to be, which can never be logically derived from "is".

Edit: To apply to your specific question, it is inherently fallacious to declare that there exists, or can exist, a "moral natural law".

edited 27th Oct '16 9:02:06 AM by Fighteer

If I may bump this thread, rather than open a new human rights discussion. ^{My two cents on human rights} For the record: I consider human rights an outgrowth of both traditional othering going back to antiquity—we civilized folks treat people this way, while the barbarians use skulls as drinking cups—and the desire to send our children to kill each other in ever more slightly less gruesome ways, which got a big boost after the world wars. That doesn't mean that either development wasn't a good thing.
Does anyone have a working definition for any of the specific human rights, or know of how their courts interpret them?

• Example 1 and probably immediately relevant to this site: UDHR^note  Universal Declaration of Human Rights (27) says:
  • (1) Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.
  • (2) Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.

I'm pretty sure 1) means that you are free to purchase art like everyone else, not steal it. You can't be barred from the cinema for your skin tone but you still need to pay for it.

That seems exceptionally narrow though.
Could not (1) say condone some form of Keep Circulating the Tapes? Or is this outweighed by 2?
Then there's the science part. Would say pricing a drug too high violate this right? ^note  To use the example du jour Or would 2 be an absolute right to keep an invention (from the cure to HIV to energy drinks that literally give you wings) to one's self?

edited 27th Feb '17 9:45:32 PM by CenturyEye

"Moral and material interests" means the right to claim ownership of one's intellectual property and to earn a share of any income that derives from it. It does not mean the right to withhold it from others.

edited 28th Feb '17 5:05:32 AM by Fighteer

The very first line of the German constitution is: The Dignity of a human can't be touched under any circumstances. (roughly translated). It is actually a pretty basic principle, which covers a lot of situations. Like, how you deal with criminals. It does make a difference if the police is freely humiliating people they arrest, or if they try to avoid it.

How does Germany go about applying this? Does it read the UDHR into dignity or just try common sense, a la "No you can't keep prisoners outside in desert heat in pink jumpsuits." (Yes, that's actually happened although the Sheriff responsible was voted out in perhaps the one good election outcome of 2016).

For starters, the Police is only supposed to use as much force as needed for the prisoner in question. Meaning it can happen that an arrest happens without handcuffs...it is all based on how the one getting arrested acts, and the nature of his crime. I'll tell you a secret: Despite all the weapon laws, there are actually a ton of illegal (and legal) weapons in Germany, and the actual criminals know how to access them. But there are rarely any shoot-outs with the police, because the criminals know perfectly well that they are way better off getting arrested for drugs (or whatever else they did) than murdering a police officer in front of eye witnesses.

And our prisons are very different from, for example, the American ones. See here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qT5DPNZ4CPk

or here (if you want to sit through a longer vid):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtV5ev6813I

And here a few opinions about the topic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJbSmi1HaAU

It works. The prison system is more focussed on rehabilitation than punishment.

edited 28th Feb '17 1:38:28 PM by Swanpride

That is inarguable, but, at least in Georgia, the facts are only marginally relevant. Rehabilitation programs are slowly being introduced, but the public has made it clear that it values punishment as a sort of feel-good measure.

Article 17 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights

• 1. No one shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to unlawful attacks on his honour and reputation.

• 2. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
  
  

Should be noted that private businesses are not included in international law, only nation states.This has been a massive issue (sweatshops, private military companies etc.).

edited 5th Mar '17 12:16:08 PM by TerminusEst

It's been thought about. In 1990 the Commission on Transnational Corporations (in the UN General Assembly) created the Draft Code of Conduct on Transnational Corporations, featuring things like:

• Transnational corporations shall respect the national sovereignty of the countries in which they operate and the right of each state to exercise its permanent sovereignty over its natural wealth and resources.
• An entity of a transnational corporations is subject to the laws, regulations and established administrative practices of the country in which it operates.
• Transnational corporations should carry out their activities in conformity with the development policies, objectives and priorities set out by the Governments of the countries in which they operate.
• Transnational corporations shall respect human rights and fundamental freedoms in the countries in which they operate.
• Without prejudice to the participation of transnational corporations in activities that are permissible under the laws of host countries, transnational corporations shall not interfere in the internal affairs of host countries.

Naturally, the wealthier states weren't having it, but they introduced a watered down version ("OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises") a decade later.

Oddly enough, the USA has a domestic way to apply international law to multinationals. The Alien Tort Statute allows: "The district courts shall have original jurisdiction of any civil action by an alien for a tort only, committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States.." So far, SCOTUS has left open the door for claims against multinational businesses, but I'd prefer those lawyers using it to keep a low profile until the close of the Trump Era.

Guys, that's twenty different shades of off-topic.

Bump

edited 16th May '17 5:35:15 PM by CenturyEye

Might have a better answer than my last to this inquiry

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (in 2012)

• The UDHR did come about after WWII and genocide was the topic du jour. There's not much (legal) basis for abrogating state sovereignty and intervening without a universal standard of human rights. (Unless you want to see laws on which populations deserve to live, eat, etc or not).

• As for why certain rights—again Fighteer's response is essentially the legal standard: custom and consent. In essence, you get this human right because, well, everyone's^note Meaning every state's doing it (and you didn't complain) or because your state signed this agreement and they're bound.

• So, they're very mechanical and tied directly to who has the upper hand in human civilization. (Social, cultural, and economic rights coincidentally lost alot of oomph when a certain socialist state vanished). You can try to say human rights are some gift of nature because of our reason or something, but that's both unfalsifiable and essentially indistinguishable from religion. ^note (And humankind has "reasoned/rationalized" from the at least the days when Democratic Athens annihilated a neutral state to when half the US fought a war to preserve their rights to slaves. Otoh, humankind has had customs of just war since the neolithic, so...) There's a logic to human rights, but its a political and legal one, not a realization of Plato's mythical perfectly just politeia.
  
  *On civil vs human rights: Civil (and political) rights are a subset of human rights having an origin in the framing of the International Bill of Human Rights and may or may not be bollock (at least as a distinct category given that: "Human rights are universal, inalienable, interrelated, interdependent and indivisible."
  I'm not sure which is the older usage (probably civil), but the two would've been merged without distinction if not for...things.
• All that said, I still wholeheartedly support their existence, because if they vanished, I'd have nothing to show for that class...^{Much longer, truer explanation} or sometimes, because I take it on faith—and I acknowledge, it has to be faith—that every human being deserves inviolable dignity and a share in the best that can be produced from the Earth in the time they have. And as slow and oft-mocked as human rights and international law are, one has to think about how strange it is that the USA (in no danger of being invaded or sanctioned) bothered to come up with a (bad) international law argument for its strike at Syria—even with Trump at the helm, or how it looks to certain "rule of law" states' citizens when said states flout legal regimes that can't really be spun any other way than bullying of smaller states, or how ink on paper oft-written by a tiny subset of the whole space and time of human civilization become important enough to legitimacy that even tinpots must pay them lipservice—at least when the spotlight's on them. (See Vietnam's and even the Soviet constitution and compare them to Louis XIV's L'etat est moi). In the past, paying homage to the strongest king gave you legitimacy. In modern times, tis debating at the UN and following the norms and laws—at least nominally, but the same applied to ancient kings. .

This is exactly wrong.

When the Union abolished slavery in the American South, the understanding was not that slavery had, through legalistic and political means, been made morally wrong. The understanding was- and this endures to this day- that slavery has in fact always been morally wrong, and people had only just then reached a sufficient level of moral, cultural and political sophistication to realize it. And, as it was for slavery, so it would also be for every other form of categorical oppression- sexism, xenophobia, etc.

It is this, the continual uncovering of moral truths through the evolving process of reason, that we call moral progress. To deny that moral truths can be reached through reason is to deny the existence of moral progress itself, and to deny moral progress is to essentially admit that you have no good reason to think slavery is morally repugnant. If morality has no teleological element, then the antebellum American South will look just as moral to you as modern America, where slavery has been outlawed. You certainly can't defend opposition to slavery on anything more than a personal level, since developing an argumentative framework that applies to people who are not yourself requires you to appeal to some concept of objective reality, which only an adherence to reason can provide.

Relating this directly back to the topic of the thread, Human Rights are in fact an inherent obligation to every Human being. Humans have always had Human Rights, the concept was only discovered and enshrined in international law- as it should have always been- with the drafting of the UDHR.

edited 17th May '17 1:39:39 AM by Gault

People have known slavery was wrong since at least the foundation of the USA.

How does this process of uncovering moral truths work? Which methods do you use to determine if something is moral or not?

It doesn't, it's just a matter of extending the Golden Rule to more and more distant people, and generally getting better at putting oneself in other's shoes and anticipating consequences. Before that, slavery was only awful when it happened to you and your kind, and was fine if it was you doing it

Reason gives you an absolute basis for determining what is or isn't morally defensible, and it is the only thing that can give you results that you can be sure apply regardless of factors such as individual perspective, culture, religion or ideology. Since Human Rights are by definition meant to apply to all Human beings, they demand reason be their justification and guarantor of universal validity and applicability.

Take Rawls' Veil of Ignorance for a good example. The thought experiment is premised on extracting yourself from your parochial perspective as the only way to judge the suitability of public policy because it dispenses with irrational and self-serving delusions. The conclusion that you reach while undertaking this thought experiment must be the conclusion everyone else reaches as well, because a rational actor- given a set of definite starting criteria- can only act in a certain way.

The Golden Rule is fine and good, but it's too weak by itself. It must be made explicitly clear that why one should treat others how they themselves want to be treated is because they have no rationally justifiable reason to believe- and therefore no reason to expect others to believe- that they possess some special place in the universe when compared to all other people. There is literally no rational reason- no reason that isn't the product of self-serving delusions to be precise- why anyone would think that they have a greater degree of inherent rights than anyone else.

edited 17th May '17 5:43:30 AM by Gault

Reason is a highly dubious property when applied to societies as a whole. The ideas of what constitute "human rights" are in constant change and they change as a result of social and ideological forces that have more to do with emotion and cultural indoctrination than they do reason or logic.

You can claim to have discovered the "ideal" system of rights, but your neighbor may also claim to have done so, and how do you decide which is correct? Is there an empirical measurement — do we have a laser interferometry system that can detect what is right? Is there a logical test? Logic cannot deduce new truths; it can only determine the validity of an argument.

"Rights" are not evident in nature. You can't dissect a person and find them inside. You can't deduce them from analyzing rocks or starlight. They only exist as constructs of human societies, and as a result they are entirely subjective to the values of those societies. Further, each society throughout history has regarded its system of rights as the "natural and proper" one, having evolved to its pinnacle through reason. They can't all be correct, any more than every religion can claim to have The Truth simultaneously.

No matter how you try to argue otherwise, you always end up at a tautology: "These rights exist because I say they do." You can't evade this basic fact.

@Gault: I think there are a couple holes in your reasoning:
1) Having objectivist (that is, not relativistic) ethics doesn't necessitate teleology. There's nothing about ethics having a purpose in, say, utilitarianism, or in Kant's ethics.
2) You can deny "moral progress" (as far as I can tell, this means "we become morally better than our predecessors") and still have a good reason to find slavery morally wrong (e.g. it decreases the general utility in the world).

However, I agree that you cannot have ethics or morals without objectivism (in this sense, no connection to Ayn Rand).

Lastly: