Do Human rights exist?

[version]

Baudrillard had a typically provocative take on human rights:

The production of waste as waste is accompanied by its idealization and its promotion in advertising. It is the same with the production of man as waste-product, which is accompanied by his being idealized and promoted in the form of human rights. Idealization always goes with abjection, just as charity always goes with destitution. This is a kind of symbolic rule. A new wave of human-beings-as-waste ('boat people', deportees, the disappeared, 'ghost-people' of all kinds) is accompanied by a new human rights offensive.

It is always the same with rights: the right to water, the right to air, the right to existence, etc. It is when all these fine things have disappeared that the law arrives to grant their disappearance official recognition. The law is like religious faith. If God exists, there is no need to believe in Him. If people do believe in Him, this is because the self-evidence of his existence has passed away. Thus, when people obtain the right to life, the fact is that they are no longer able to live.

 

[vimothy]

baudrillard imagines a sole legal sovereign who grants rights too late in the game. but the problem is more fundamental. theres no reason why china , for eg, should recognise the same universal rights or even the concept of universal rights, as the liberal west

 

[vimothy]

the political context, upon which universal rights rests, is completely different

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

how do you square the circle?

you can't necessarily. you just have to do your best. sometimes that's hard. usually there's no perfect solution.

but it's always better to have a conception of basic human rights than to not have one

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

as plenty of folks here will know, this is a problem at the very origin of Western political philosophy

Socrates' disciples and especially Plato sneered at Athenian democracy specifically bc it was messy and had contradictions

i.e. in the Republic there are no rights, only duties. Plato et al saw humans as a herd to be lead, rather than individuals capable of self-governance.

no one's managed to square the circle in the last 2400 years and I don't think we'll do it here either

 

[version]

baudrillard imagines a sole legal sovereign who grants rights too late in the game. but the problem is more fundamental. theres no reason why china , for eg, should recognise the same universal rights or even the concept of universal rights, as the liberal west

the political context, upon which universal rights rests, is completely different

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.

 

[sufi]

It's all very vague isn't it?

only when you consider it in lofty philosophical terms (or maybe bad faith or lack of understanding)

you can define what are HR universally or not, but how far they exist depends on whether they are accessible - they are dependent on real life processes and relationships in the justice system mainly, so that humans can enjoy life liberty sustenance etc

 

[WashYourHands]

@no-one all it takes are a few guns on the table and your ‘rights’ exit, just like your bowels

at work and some cunt is insisting on watching Love and Mercy - love and mercy are not universal human rights even if we create lore around how fantastic their qualities are/could be at scale

 

[WashYourHands]

night shift fugue post, younger Wilson sections werent bad but a disheveled mumbling John Cusack as Wilson in later life? ridiculous, as bad as Nell

remembering visits to family in Belfast and beyond when army patrols and checkpoints were a reality, you had fuck all rights in dark alleys or side-streets and no truths ever arose from any problems experienced up close and acutely personal, certainly no justice

problems tended to follow a routine - divide everyone by fighting age, move any kids and the elderly to one area and keep them rattled, keep men in restraint induced stress positions maybe apply a rifle butt or 3 to the face and slap a lass round to get all their blood up as a remembrance note of ritual humiliation amongst mass slaughter

we can aspire to enacting human rights in law but how to enforce such? civil rights movements are grand statements of intent but statutes are altered or amended or suspended altogether when deemed suitably appropriate or on a whim, just add imprisonment, murder, mass murder. by extension, entire constitutions exist as a loose bunch of archaic laws focused primarily on property and all its judicial precedents

do you patrol the world hypocritically seeking and demanding universality in how any of the above is practiced across multiple cultures and worldviews? of course not because such a task would prove endlessly futile. do you find commonality in respect of ethics, assuming ethics inform statutes or underpin values often severely compromised by hypocrisy? see Brics

war is far too profitably endemic for any of this institutionalised nonsense to get in the way of coining it and human rights may as well be a sales gimmick we repeat to ourselves to sleep at night in the face of such madness

Universal Declaration of Human Rights | United Nations

A milestone document in the history of human rights, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights set out, for the first time, fundamental human rights to be universally protected. It has been translated into over 500 languages.

www.un.org

 

[version]

You can be of so little interest to anyone in power that you effectively have no rights, e.g. the homeless, people living in slums and working in sweatshops, but you can also be of such interest that you end up in a similar position, e.g. people disappeared into black sites.

There's a sweet spot on the spectrum where you can almost take them for granted by virtue of never having to invoke them.

 

[dilbert1]

Yes. Hannah Arendt called this “the right to have rights.” I’m sorry I always just spam 20+ page PDFs nowadays but this essay of hers on the topic is also a classic https://german.rutgers.edu/docman-lister/events/684-arendt-decline-of-the-nation-state/file

 

[mixed_biscuits]

deciding what those rights should be

...is a matter for the Grand Randomisation Machine

 

[mixed_biscuits]

you can't necessarily. you just have to do your best. sometimes that's hard. usually there's no perfect solution.

but it's always better to have a conception of basic human rights than to not have one

There is not so much an innate morality as an eternal one, threaded through all of our disincarnate and incarnate existences, between the poles of the Light/Love/God and its absence. Everyone is connected to this to some degree at least with cultural differences modulating its expression. Rights are a culture-transmuted attempt to formalise the societal expression of people generally acting in a way that conforms to the dictates of intuitions given by conscience's expression of the ultimate and eternal Good.

 

[shiels]

Starmer is the timely example here’s isn’t he in how hypocritical and slippery the concept is. our brains and guts haven’t evolved to cope with international law and matters of the global human yet. And those principles are only invoked in the worst atrocities so of course they’re vague and abstract and also come with loads of emotional charge, they’re shoddily enforced and adhered to, and seem like platitudes when discussed without specific tragic things. The vague impressionistic power of the UN to me seems totalitarian to some and absolutely fuck all to others

 

[shakahislop]

part of the post world two morality, along with things like the geneva convention, the idea of crimes against humanity, war crimes, the genocide convention arguably decolonization.

there's an associated group of things that build on the above like the convention on the rights of the child, the chemical weapons convention, the ongoing effort to prevent nuclear weapons proliferation.

some of these things are the high points of human civilization

all these things are formal treaties but also international norms, as well as a basic part of our moral beliefs and the moral beliefs of a load of publics and governors around the world.

background assumptions that are largely so normal that we take them for granted

you can't get too caught up in thinking only about our countries when you think about these things.

 

[shakahislop]

it's not quite the same thing but I'd add tangentially things around international public health efforts to the list. the eradication of smallpox being the highlight. but also childhood vaccination in the 70s and 80s. huge achievements based on a set of fundamental moral beliefs about the world and the minimum standards to which all human beings should be entitled

 

[Mr. Tea]

it's not quite the same thing but I'd add tangentially things around international public health efforts to the list. the eradication of smallpox being the highlight. but also childhood vaccination in the 70s and 80s. huge achievements based on a set of fundamental moral beliefs about the world and the minimum standards to which all human beings should be entitled

And now look how much emphasis so many people place on the right, for example, not to be vaccinated.

Edit: or even for the right to deprive their children of that right, I mean.

 

[shakahislop]

And now look how much emphasis so many people place on the right, for example, not to be vaccinated.

i don't think you can really enforce it. even if you wanted to it provokes a lot of resistance. as an extension of the state to the individual body it becomes an avenue for the expression of greviences people have with the state. and everyone has those grievences, especially if you have any experience of being poor or marginalized in another way. that's part of the experience of living within a state. it's inherent. im talking about myself too, i have a lot of beef with the uk government, probably everyone on here does. they really kicked the shit out of me growing up. post-thatcher, neoliberalism and so on

vaccination is also invisible, it's hard to make that behavior legible to a state. easy to escape it if you don't want to do it. enforced vaccination is beyond state capacity generally

the problem comes when your refusal to be vaccinated prevents states (particularly the public health bits of them) from achieving important immunization dreams. which are good dreams for states to have. coz they prevent a lot of suffering

 

[Benny Bunter]

Some nice responses to this, please don't turn it into another COVID thread though.

I like mixed biscuits' post best so far, but I wouldn't really disagree with anything anyone's said.

 

[Benny Bunter]

I do worry that the way everyone always bangs on about human rights these days kills thought, and that we might be better off focussing on improving the laws in our own countries first before judging and intervening in others.