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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34966 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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True, human rights are political. Who defines them? Who interprets them?

This is the biggest "emperor's new clothes" problem in all of modern politics. When it's pointed out that "human rights" were pulled out of some committee's ass 70 years ago and have absolutely zero philosophical grounding**, the room gets quiet for a moment, people clear their throats awkwardly, and then a few seconds later conversation picks up again and politics continues as usual. I can't stand it.

Obligatory Legutko quote (long but well worth reading):

Especially striking is a change in the meaning of the word "dignity" which since antiquity has been used as a term of obligation.

If one was presumed to have dignity, one was expected to behave in a proper way as required by his elevated status. Dignity was something to be earned, deserved, and confirmed by acting in accordance with the higher standards imposed by a community or religion-for instance, by empowering a certain person with higher responsibilities or by claiming that man was created in God's image. Dignity was an attribute that ennobled those who acquired it. As noblesse oblige, dignity was an obligation to seek some form of self-improvement, however vaguely understood, but certainly closer to the Socratic way and further away from its opposite. The attribute was not bestowed forever: one could always lose it when acting in an undignified way.

At some point, the concept of dignity was given a different meaning, contrary to the original. This happened mainly through the intercession of the language of human rights, especially after the 1948 Universal Declaration. The idea of human beings having inalienable rights is counterintuitive and extremely difficult to justify. It may make some philosophical sense if derived from a strong theory of human nature such as one finds in classical metaphysics. However, when we accept a weak theory, attributing to human beings only elementary qualities, and deliberately disregarding strong metaphysical assumptions, then the idea of rights loses its plausibility. It may, of course, be sanctioned as a mere product of legislation through a Parliamentary or court ruling, which entitles people to make various claims called "rights," but these claims will be no more than arbitrary decisions by particular groups of politicians or judges who choose to do this rather than that due to circumstances, ideology, or individual predilections or under pressure from interest groups. It would indeed be silly to call such claims "inalienable," because inalienability by definition cannot be legislated.

Thus, in order to strengthen the unjustified and [...] unjustifiable notion of human rights, the concept of dignity was invoked, but in a peculiar way so as to make it seem to imply more than it actually did. This concept created an illusion of a strong view of human nature, and of endowing this nature with qualities nowhere explicitly specified but implying something noble, being an immortal soul, an innate desire for good, etc. But on the other hand, in using this concept, unaccompanied by other qualifications, the framers of the human rights documents apparently felt exempted from any need to present an explicit and serious philosophical interpretation of human nature and to explain the grounds and the conditions on which one could conceive of its dignity. This operation-or more precisely, sleight of hand, and not very fair to boot-led to a sudden revival of the concept of human dignity, but with a radically different meaning.

Since the issue of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, dignity has no longer been about obligation, but about claims and entitlements. The new dignity did not oblige people to strive for any moral merits or deserts; it allowed them to submit whatever claims they wished, and to justify these claims by referring to a dignity that they possessed by the mere fact of being born without any moral achievement or effort. A person who desired to achieve the satisfaction of a pig was thus equally entitled to appeal to dignity to justify his goals as another who tried to follow the path of Socrates, and each time, for a pig and for a Socrates, this was the same dignity. A right to be a pig and a right to be a Socrates were, in fact, equal and stemmed from the same moral (or rather nonmoral, as the new dignity practically broke off with morality) source.

Having armed himself with rights, modern man found himself in a most comfortable situation with no precedent: he no longer had to justify his claims and actions as long as he qualified them as rights. Regardless of what demands he would make on the basis of those rights and for what purpose he would use them, he did not and, in fact, could not lose his dignity, which he had acquired for life simply by being born human. And since having this dignity carried no obligation to do anything par ticularly good or worthy, he could, while constantly invoking it, make claims that were increasingly more absurd and demand justification for ever more questionable activities. Sinking more and more into arrogant vulgarity, he could argue that this vulgarity not only did not contradict his inborn dignity, but it could even, by a stretch of the imagination, be treated as some sort of an achievement. After all, can a dignity that is inborn and constitutes the essence of humanness, generate anything that would be essentially undignified and nonhuman?

The idea of human rights goes back well before 1948, though I agree that they have never been successfully grounded. The closest anyone has ever come is Hobbes, who does so by asserting that everyone has a natural right to everything they can possibly do or obtain, even to kill another person, and then explaining political order in terms of individuals collectively agreeing to give up some of their rights in order to maintain peace.

The problem of course being that Hobbesian natural rights are wholly negative unlike "human rights" which tend to be positive affirmations of State granted privileges.

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