Needs alt text or link to source, and that’s just the author admitting their failure to grasp the distinction between moral philosophy & statutory law.
Ideas such as inalienable/universal/inherent rights come from moral philosophy.
The premise is that they exist regardless of whether people choose to respect them: no one can revoke those rights, only violate them.
Violations are unjust.
They don’t imply a legal system can’t violate ethics.[1]
They’re for arguing a system shouldn’t & to demand a more just one.
It’s still up to the people to get that system.
Supposing is implies ought is a naturalistic fallacy.
The Enlightenment thinkers who developed these ideas were completely aware that they can and do, so for the author to treat that as not the exact problem they were addressing is awfully special.
They were devising a definition for legitimate authority based on moral philosophy & not on divine right to rule. ↩︎
But like… Morals are relative. They’re frameworks built around core values, they’re not a property of the universe. They’re not self evident, they’re axioms we choose to value collectively
Rights are things that must always be fought for, and they can be both established and worn away. They’re a social construct
Rights are things that come before the law, they’re the boundaries of the law. But like the rule of law itself, they only exist through collective belief and action, otherwise they’re just words
I don’t think it needs to be dressed up more than that. Good things are good and bad things are bad, rights protect people from bad things from the state
You’ll never convince people who think good things are bad, because they don’t have good values. You shouldn’t engage with them on an equal level, because their values are inferior… At this point we just need to make it socially unacceptable to share their fucked up opinions
What if a bad supreme court can come in and take away rights? If that’s the case, then it doesn’t matter if it’s explicitly listed in some kind of constitutional document because the bad court can choose to interpret that document in such a way that the right disappears. By this definition, there’s no such thing as a right, because there’s always someone who can come in and take it away. There aren’t, and can not be, any actual rights, just conditional privileges.
But, that isn’t a very useful definition. In some sense, it’s obviously true. If a warlord takes over a country they might suddenly forbid something everybody assumed was a right. That’s why we have the saying “might makes right”. Fundamentally the only rights you really have are the ones that you’re strong enough to prevent someone from taking away. It certainly helps to have them written down in some kind of founding document, but it’s no guarantee of anything.
Oh, so by your genius logic, slavery wasn’t a human rights violation—just a ‘conditional privilege’ for some states? And I guess age of consent laws are just ‘local customs,’ not protections? Congrats, you’ve outed yourself as the kind of brainlet who thinks rights are whatever’s convenient for your backward agenda. Sit down, you absolute embarrassment.
If a right varies from state to state, it’s not a right, it’s a conditional privilege.
It’s kind of inherent to the concept of rights that they exist in some framework of authority.
Cavemen could have shouted that they have human rights to the other cavemen bashing their heads in and it would have been utterly meaningless.
By that logic there is no rights. It ignores what a fight is supposed to be practically and legally
Needs alt text or link to source, and that’s just the author admitting their failure to grasp the distinction between moral philosophy & statutory law.
Ideas such as inalienable/universal/inherent rights come from moral philosophy. The premise is that they exist regardless of whether people choose to respect them: no one can revoke those rights, only violate them. Violations are unjust.
They don’t imply a legal system can’t violate ethics.[1] They’re for arguing a system shouldn’t & to demand a more just one. It’s still up to the people to get that system.
Supposing is implies ought is a naturalistic fallacy.
The Enlightenment thinkers who developed these ideas were completely aware that they can and do, so for the author to treat that as not the exact problem they were addressing is awfully special. They were devising a definition for legitimate authority based on moral philosophy & not on divine right to rule. ↩︎
I’d argue they are still rights whether the law is behind it or not. These things are always a moral entitlement; not always a lawful one.
But like… Morals are relative. They’re frameworks built around core values, they’re not a property of the universe. They’re not self evident, they’re axioms we choose to value collectively
Rights are things that must always be fought for, and they can be both established and worn away. They’re a social construct
Rights are things that come before the law, they’re the boundaries of the law. But like the rule of law itself, they only exist through collective belief and action, otherwise they’re just words
I don’t think it needs to be dressed up more than that. Good things are good and bad things are bad, rights protect people from bad things from the state
You’ll never convince people who think good things are bad, because they don’t have good values. You shouldn’t engage with them on an equal level, because their values are inferior… At this point we just need to make it socially unacceptable to share their fucked up opinions
What if a bad supreme court can come in and take away rights? If that’s the case, then it doesn’t matter if it’s explicitly listed in some kind of constitutional document because the bad court can choose to interpret that document in such a way that the right disappears. By this definition, there’s no such thing as a right, because there’s always someone who can come in and take it away. There aren’t, and can not be, any actual rights, just conditional privileges.
But, that isn’t a very useful definition. In some sense, it’s obviously true. If a warlord takes over a country they might suddenly forbid something everybody assumed was a right. That’s why we have the saying “might makes right”. Fundamentally the only rights you really have are the ones that you’re strong enough to prevent someone from taking away. It certainly helps to have them written down in some kind of founding document, but it’s no guarantee of anything.
Freedom is something you take. Whether for yourself or another, and it’s always from some fucking duechbag who wants slaves and not equals
Didn’t know that George Carlin came back from the dead
Oh, so by your genius logic, slavery wasn’t a human rights violation—just a ‘conditional privilege’ for some states? And I guess age of consent laws are just ‘local customs,’ not protections? Congrats, you’ve outed yourself as the kind of brainlet who thinks rights are whatever’s convenient for your backward agenda. Sit down, you absolute embarrassment.
Are you ok? 👀