Do Human rights exist?

[shakahislop]

There seem to be a fair few teachers who feel this has gone too far and made it impossible to maintain discipline in the classroom.

I have no idea what goes on in classrooms or what the right balance is. but that is kind of the point of child rights. that people like teachers can't just do what they want / what would be more convenient / easier etc. raising the bar for how children are treated.

 

[version]

The gist of what I read was teachers feeling their hands were tied when dealing with disruptive students as the schools live in fear of angry parents coming in who refuse to believe their children could be at fault.

 

[Mr. Tea]

I have no idea what goes on in classrooms or what the right balance is. but that is kind of the point of child rights. that people like teachers can't just do what they want / what would be more convenient / easier etc. raising the bar for how children are treated.

If teachers have reached the point of going on strike because they're afraid for their own safety, then whatever the "right balance" is, I think it's probably not that.

 

[shakahislop]

the way autistic children are treated by the state, for example, is governed by the CRC. because they are a universal inalienable concept. they are set a higher bar for people that a lot of states would basically see as it being too difficult to give a decent standard of living to. so this particular form of human rights forces governments to do better

 

[mixed_biscuits]

Allow me to explain how process ontology informs both the question of human rights, and outcomes in game theory. This is based on my reading of Everything Flows. Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology by Daniel J. Nicholson, John Dupré

1. Dynamic rights - If humans are seen as dynamic processes rather than fixed entities, the commonly enumerated set of static human rights may need rethinking. Rights may need to be more flexible and adaptive to account for the constantly changing physical, social, and psychological processes inherent in human existence.
2. Relational rights - By emphasizing emergence from component relationships, process ontology highlights that humans are fundamentally relational beings, dependent on social connections. This could support arguments for more relational conceptions of rights, including collective rights held by cultural groups or indigenous communities.
3. Developmental rights - The process view suggests that what constitutes human flourishing emerges gradually over time. This may lend support to ideas about developmental rights that change in nature over the course of an individual’s lifetime, such as special rights afforded to children.
4. Anti-essentialism - Since process ontology denies static essences, it is deeply anti-essentialist. This could weaken traditional appeals to human nature or dignity as the basis for rights. More empirical, consequentialist justifications may be needed rather than metaphysical appeals.
5. Valuing dynamic order - The process view values the stability and continuity provided by dynamic self-organizing processes. This could ground conceptions of rights focused on maintaining social order and peaceful interrelations between changing identities and communities.

Core ideas from process biology could inform and impact game theory:

1. Dynamic games - Traditional game theory often assumes static payoff matrices and timeless rational choices. By emphasizing temporality, process biology suggests the need for modeling sequential, dynamic games that evolve over time as players interact and adapt.
2. Non-equilibrium analysis - Process ontology focuses on flows, fluxes, and far-from-equilibrium dynamics in living systems. This could support greater use of non-equilibrium methods in game theory rather than only analyzing equilibrium states.
3. Multi-scale analysis - The concepts of emergence and hierarchical organization in process biology indicate that strategic choices happen at multiple scales. Game theory may need to model decision-making and interaction effects across levels of agency.
4. Relational rationality - Rather than focusing only on individual rationality, process biology's relational perspective suggests game theory adopt a more ecological view of rationality emerging from dynamic relationships between interdependent actors.
5. Anti-essentialism - The anti-essentialist commitments of process ontology could lead to questioning blanket assumptions of uniform rationality or utility functions for analyzing strategic behavior. More context-sensitive analysis of diverse modes of strategic rationality may be needed.

Some thoughts:

a) As it is, children have different rights to adults e.g. they don't have a right not to be incarcerated or enslaved by members of their family (i.e. grounded or made to do chores).
b) How is this flux to be measured?
c) If humans are processes, and a change in a certain direction has been identified, are the rights to be based on the current state of affairs or the future one in expectation of more change in the same direction? This could lead to feedback effects.
d) The persistence of certain cultural and/or religious norms over centuries suggest that the human capacity for adaptation can ironically enable continued adherence to unchanging conceptions of what it means to be human in a given social context.
e) I'm wary of any philosophy that posits fundamental human mutability because a crackpot utopian politics is sure to be hot on its heels.

 

[version]

I was disruptive in school and it was definitely the harsher teachers who managed to keep more of a lid on it as I didn't want a detention or a bollocking.

 

[yyaldrin]

human rights are often used to bomb innocent people

 

[mixed_biscuits]

human rights are often used to bomb innocent people

This is why human rights should be restricted to transformations of divine pronouncements: thou shalt not kill would put a lid on all this nonsense.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

what else is there. the idea of human rights are a countervailing force. they are finally an idea which protects us, backed up in a small number of places by legal structures.

yes. human rights vs improving laws and political processes is a false dichotomy.

a concept of human rights doesn't stop anyone from trying to improve laws and political processes

a concept of human rights is a beginning rather than an end state

that is the whole point of distinguishing between rights as inalienable (i.e. given) and rights achieved thru some process, usually of struggle

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

some declarations of human rights being disingenuous or hypocritical is a separate issue from whether we should have human rights at all. I am as skeptical a person as you'll find about the efficacy of international law and the ethics of how it's actually applied. I'd still rather have, for example, a Universal Declaration of Human Rights than no such document, despite all the criticisms that can be made about how it imposes a particular conception of human rights as universal or how the UN has no power to enforce any of its articles. even if it is a hypocritical fiction, it is still useful as a hypocritical fiction as long as you understand its limits rather than thinking it is the final world on human rights (and who does that?).

more concretely, look at the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. obviously it would have been much better to prohibit slavery right away, but the contradiction of declaring "all men are created equal" with slavery was one starting point for a long struggle by black people and abolitionists, and eventually a terrible war, to prohibit slavery in the Constitution. indeed part of Lincoln's personal opposition to slavery was based on that contradiction, as well as the idea that if you don't prohibit slavery, anyone can eventually be enslaved (i.e. it not need be racial). so these hypocritical and imperfect fictions can still have a positive effect.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

He isn't talking about the world. He's talking about the liberal West and its campaign of homogenisation at the end of the century, the exporting of Democracy and Human Rights.

he's also talking about the transmutation of rights - those we associate with liberal democracies - that were achieved thru struggle back into inalienable rights by govts (and other interested bodies) in service of a specific ideology and policies in a type of recuperation i.e. the deployment of an inalienable form of "human rights" as an ideological weapon. we have them, they don't, e.g. we are better and [x bad thing we're doing] is justified because we are better.

that's exactly why it's important to not only have a concept of human rights but to consistently fight to see it actually realized, and against its cooptation

 

[Benny Bunter]

might as well say 'there's no such thing as morality'

Where does morality come from?

We seem to have decided as a forum that human rights don't actually exist

 

[vimothy]

He isn't talking about the world. He's talking about the liberal West and its campaign of homogenisation at the end of the century, the exporting of Democracy and Human Rights.

that's the same thing I'm talking about. but the question remains, how to apply this to a global context in which democracy and human rights means something different

 

[Clinamenic]

I tend to think of human rights, and of standards in general, as being intersubjectively enforced by whatever institutions have the requisite power to enforce such standards over observing populations. Beyond that, it seems a more diffuse and anarchic matter of opinions, with little to no shared reference frame for reconciling them.

 

[maxi]

Where does morality come from?

We seem to have decided as a forum that human rights don't actually exist

I think it's a structure that exists naturally in our minds as part of our biology, and the expansion of human rights reflects a growing ability to penetrate into that structure

 

[Benny Bunter]

.

I think it's a structure that exists naturally in our minds as part of our biology, and the expansion of human rights reflects a growing ability to penetrate into that structure

As a sort of darwinistic sort of thing or not? Evolution, survival of the fittest doesn't really fit well with universal human rights does it? Or maybe you mean something else.

Mixed biscuits is the only one who's brought god into it so far. Everyone else seems to be swerving the issue.

 

[HMGovt’s Glorious Return!]

Some thoughts:

a) As it is, children have different rights to adults e.g. they don't have a right not to be incarcerated or enslaved by members of their family (i.e. grounded or made to do chores).
b) How is this flux to be measured?
c) If humans are processes, and a change in a certain direction has been identified, are the rights to be based on the current state of affairs or the future one in expectation of more change in the same direction? This could lead to feedback effects.
d) The persistence of certain cultural and/or religious norms over centuries suggest that the human capacity for adaptation can ironically enable continued adherence to unchanging conceptions of what it means to be human in a given social context.
e) I'm wary of any philosophy that posits fundamental human mutability because a crackpot utopian politics is sure to be hot on its heels.

a) You're right that kids already have different rights than adults. So even with this idea of evolving rights, there would still need to be basic protections for more vulnerable groups. It's not a free-for-all based on someone's stage of life.

b) Good question. I admit "measuring flux" sounds pretty vague. This is still just a philosophical concept without the nitty-gritty specifics of how it could actually play out legally. So I don't have a foolproof plan here.

c) Tricky one. Are rights locked in based on how things are right now, or how we guess they might change in the future? That could definitely get messy. No easy answer from me here either.

d) Fair critique. Just because some theory says human experience is always shifting doesn't mean real-world social norms and beliefs actually budge that fast. People might just cling harder to the status quo in the face of that change.

e) Caution taken! "Crackpot utopian politics" is probably lurking around the corner with any philosophy that claims to have all the answers, and understanding is itself a process that can be sliced and diced in time, one moment looking very different from the other. This is just one perspective; other worldviews clearly still have value.

 

[droid]

As a sort of darwinistic sort of thing or not? Evolution, survival of the fittest doesn't really fit well with universal human rights does it? Or maybe you mean something else.

Mixed biscuits is the only one who's brought god into it so far. Everyone else seems to be swerving the issue.

It's the exact opposite. Humans are social animals who require a high degree of cooperation to survive and succeed. This necessitates a level of what we would describe as moral behaviour; fairness, equity, compassion etc. Cooperation is and has been a crucial factor in human evolution and many other primates exhibit similar behaviours.

Human rights legislation is an attempt to formalise this in law and extend it to the relationships between states.

 

[Benny Bunter]

Ok, I can see that, but it's pretty hard to argue we are actually evolving (a growing ability, as maxi said) into a morally better species considering the state of the world at the moment. Seems a bit over optimistic to me.

 

[maxi]

Ok, I can see that, but it's pretty hard to argue we are actually evolving (a growing ability, as maxi said) into a morally better species considering the state of the world at the moment. Seems a bit over optimistic to me.

I'm not saying it's evolving in the sense you mean - that the entire species is somehow changing in any way.

the first thing I'm saying is that the moral structure that exists in our mind developed as part of human biology and is essentially the same for everyone as we are all the same species.

and the second thing is that when people then develop concepts such as human rights, that reflects those people's ability to understand that moral structure that already exists within everyone.

for example, to recognise that all human beings have an equal right to life and not just our own tribe. the people who recognise that are accessing (via reasoned arguments and moral philosophy - not a biological change) a preexisting moral structure in their minds. the people who disagree with that statement, I'm arguing, are failing to access the same moral structure to the same degree. but the moral structure in their minds is exactly the same i.e. they have the potential to reach the same position but are failing in their reasoning.

human rights is just a concept that attempts to define the inalienable moral rights that all human beings have. at the most basic level, I think we'd all agree that every person has a right not to be murdered for example. the right to life. and then everyone can argue over which other human rights exist, and which things described as "human rights" shouldn't be.

then human rights law is a way of enshrining the things we've decided are human rights into law. those laws can be written well or badly, which is a separate issue. and then they can be enforced or implemented well or badly, which is another separate issue.