Isn’t the idea of rights that they are endowed upon or imbued into each individual by some supernatural authority, like a god? I mean, aren’t rights metaphysical, in that they are not context dependent, and exist even outside of time and space itself? Like, the idea of inherent individual rights is that you can remove a person from any given time and place, move that individual to any other time and place, and their “rights” would follow with them, not unlike a soul.
This is not correct. Rights are a construct of human law that can be traced to a series of foundational legal documents and structures of government processes. It evolved out of the privileges given by royalty to variable degrees of their subjects into the ideas foundational to liberalism and other political philosophies of humanitarian ethics which established an idea of aspects of human life and choices that were sacrosanct from government interference or entitlements citizens have in their systems. You have probably heard of the phrase “God given rights” but that is more or less just a saying that came from the concept of rights becoming such a social norm that one considers them the air we breathe.
Religious individuals, from personal experience, tend to have an issue grocking the idea that ethics are not dependent on the idea of a God outright telling you what is good or bad - secular ethics isn’t about what gets you punished or not by an authority. It determines what is correct based off of different rubrics based on the individual school of ethics one applies. More often ethical systems, including modern law systems, are based out of some idea of empathy towards harm and struggles in life divorced entirely from the idea of punishment by a divine being.
Rights are also place dependent because they are built into the law system of whatever country you are in. If you are in China for instance you do not have a right to free speech, the Government can censor you or exact retribution for trying to publish or communicate certain things. Like any law though just cuz it’s on the books doesn’t mean it’s in play. Russia technically has a right to free speech but their courts basically ignore infringement on it when it suits them to do so.
There is an idea of an international code of human rights… But really it is still considered a lower priority than the idea of individual nation sovereignty so protection of those rights is toothless and it is effectively more like gold star guidelines put forward by committee than actual rules.
Well yes… Because liberalism if very forward in enabling a lot of personal property rights and is generally in tension with socialism. We’ve had an awfully long period of treating liberalism as the air we breathe.
But whenever we talk about liberalism it is important to remember it’s a whole package deal of a host of distinct concepts that were basically come up with by the handful of people who claimed the school of thought. It encompasses such vastly differing sources as the spirit of the French Revolutionaries declaring the Rights of Men AND the class obsessed, monarchy friendly, property rights forward English intelligencia. Liberalism holds within it a multitude of characters and we are seeing some of the design flaws now but in it’s day it was a radical dissolution of power of the state from an authoritarian norm that is alien to our modern sensibilities.
Liberalism has become a dirty word by virtue of it basically being compatible with a variable degree of capitalism and we are in an age of unchecked capitalism. Personally I think a balance of heavy socialism and very moderated liberalism to keep power from tipping too much towards state consolidation is actually pretty stable. But I think people like the emotional fire of the Communists writers because it’s evocative and because throwing everything in the trash and starting over speaks to the anger of feeling disenfranchised.
Liberalism holds within it a multitude of characters and we are seeing some of the design flaws now but in it’s day it was a radical dissolution of power of the state from an authoritarian norm that is alien to our modern sensibilities.
Yes, liberalism has an important historical significance. It also has a specific historical context. Unfortunately, many academics and intellectuals came to see it as a permanent, natural state; as the only paradigm that should, or even can, exist.
I think many people of today underestimate how popular the idea of “the end of history” was after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The idea that liberal “democracy” and capitalism represented the last and only sociopolitical/socioeconomic system humanity would ever need - that it was the culmination of all human history - was adopted by nearly every elite member of society. History was over, there was no alternative, and we shouldn’t try to develop humanity any further. Not only was any significant change unnecessary and undesirable, it was harmful and destructive. Human civilization had to stay in a permanent state of arrested development essentially forever.
This thinking was not restricted to just a vocal minority, it was the consensus, and with Marxism-Leninism defeated, there was no ideological opposition. Liberalism (neoliberalism, liberal democracy, capitalism) was the unquestioned champion and there were no more challengers.
But history had not ended, and no paradigm, however dominant, can remain in place permanently. Change is inevitable, humanity and civilization continue to evolve, and as new historical and material conditions emerge, so too will new ideas, just as liberalism did in its time and place.
Humanity is facing incredible challenges, and I’m not sure liberalism has all the tools necessary to adequately address all of them. Maybe no one ideology does. Maybe we need to take a post modern approach and look at all the different ideas and philosophies as tools in a tool box, and simply use whichever one we think might work best to address a specific problem. Then again, maybe humans don’t work that way, maybe the patchwork approach of “just do whatever works” is incompatible with a natural human desire to have a grand, unified, overarching ideological paradigm in place.
Regardless, I think liberalism’s ideological hegemony is rapidly falling apart. I fear it will be replaced by something worse, and by “worse” I mean even less sufficient for addressing the many challenges facing humanity today. I think that’s happening because liberalism became so entrenched, so rigid and so immovable. I just hope it’s not too late to come up with something better.
Well, I didn’t construct this description out of thin air. It’s based on how the concept of individual rights has been explained to me by various people over the years.
Natural rights vs positive rights debate depends on your personal secularity. If you believe first degree rights can only be emitted by unfalsifiable entities and you wish to keep those rights, then your stuck with those potentially undemocratic organisations who make questionable knowledge about those unfalsifiable entities. The alternative would be to accept that people can empower themselves and dismantle discrimination (ie rights) in democratic processes.
I don’t have a written record of every interaction I’ve ever had regarding this topic, unfortunately.
However, I’ve had a number of conversations or debates that have gone something like:
I will say that rights are essentially meaningless without a sufficiently strong state to enforce said rights, and they’ll reply that the state doesn’t grant rights, they can only take them away, and that the rights are theirs even if the state doesn’t recognize or enforce them. These conversations are usually with people who are very suspicious of state authority, even going so far as wanting to see the state abolished completely.
It’s kind of understandable, they’re usually American and one of the foundational documents of the US famously states that “…all men are…endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…” Every child in the US is taught this, more or less from birth.
It’s a type of social contract. In the traditionalist culture, being non-secular, they ascribed it to “God”, but, as you know, there is no God, so it was actually up to real people belonging to religious institutions, the clergy. Since the Enlightenment, people have tried to replace God with Nature; this has often been a bad joke with terrible consequences, but eventually secular paradigms took over and tried to reason the contracts into shape, to make them more consistent. There’s a lot of philosophy about this and I can’t summarize it as easily. But what you’re seeing today with Trump and the traditionalists, this anti-secularism, is a desire to return to the pre-Enlightenment state with its contracts and monarchy and aristocracy determined by “God”:
unfortunately, those are dignities, not rights. rights are a legal contract between you and your governing body. rights are granted. dignities are the things that are intrinsically connected to your personhood, your humanity, or both.
Edit: it seems like rights are only available to people who have enough power, money, and/or influence over the state to persuade them to grant then the rights they desire.
unfortunately, yes. this understanding of what rights and dignities are is what fully converted me to anarchism/communism in college. since the government values greed over all other human forces, our rights will always be more restricted than our dignities. our only hope as common people with net worths south of 1 billion dollars is to resist every chance we get.
precisely. when we talk about who runs the government and how they should operate it, we are generally (i can’t speak for everyone) trying to navigate getting the rights the government grants us to align as perfectly as possible with the dignities we possess
Isn’t the idea of rights that they are endowed upon or imbued into each individual by some supernatural authority, like a god? I mean, aren’t rights metaphysical, in that they are not context dependent, and exist even outside of time and space itself? Like, the idea of inherent individual rights is that you can remove a person from any given time and place, move that individual to any other time and place, and their “rights” would follow with them, not unlike a soul.
This is not correct. Rights are a construct of human law that can be traced to a series of foundational legal documents and structures of government processes. It evolved out of the privileges given by royalty to variable degrees of their subjects into the ideas foundational to liberalism and other political philosophies of humanitarian ethics which established an idea of aspects of human life and choices that were sacrosanct from government interference or entitlements citizens have in their systems. You have probably heard of the phrase “God given rights” but that is more or less just a saying that came from the concept of rights becoming such a social norm that one considers them the air we breathe.
Religious individuals, from personal experience, tend to have an issue grocking the idea that ethics are not dependent on the idea of a God outright telling you what is good or bad - secular ethics isn’t about what gets you punished or not by an authority. It determines what is correct based off of different rubrics based on the individual school of ethics one applies. More often ethical systems, including modern law systems, are based out of some idea of empathy towards harm and struggles in life divorced entirely from the idea of punishment by a divine being.
Rights are also place dependent because they are built into the law system of whatever country you are in. If you are in China for instance you do not have a right to free speech, the Government can censor you or exact retribution for trying to publish or communicate certain things. Like any law though just cuz it’s on the books doesn’t mean it’s in play. Russia technically has a right to free speech but their courts basically ignore infringement on it when it suits them to do so.
There is an idea of an international code of human rights… But really it is still considered a lower priority than the idea of individual nation sovereignty so protection of those rights is toothless and it is effectively more like gold star guidelines put forward by committee than actual rules.
Seems like liberalism is falling out of favor these days.
Well yes… Because liberalism if very forward in enabling a lot of personal property rights and is generally in tension with socialism. We’ve had an awfully long period of treating liberalism as the air we breathe.
But whenever we talk about liberalism it is important to remember it’s a whole package deal of a host of distinct concepts that were basically come up with by the handful of people who claimed the school of thought. It encompasses such vastly differing sources as the spirit of the French Revolutionaries declaring the Rights of Men AND the class obsessed, monarchy friendly, property rights forward English intelligencia. Liberalism holds within it a multitude of characters and we are seeing some of the design flaws now but in it’s day it was a radical dissolution of power of the state from an authoritarian norm that is alien to our modern sensibilities.
Liberalism has become a dirty word by virtue of it basically being compatible with a variable degree of capitalism and we are in an age of unchecked capitalism. Personally I think a balance of heavy socialism and very moderated liberalism to keep power from tipping too much towards state consolidation is actually pretty stable. But I think people like the emotional fire of the Communists writers because it’s evocative and because throwing everything in the trash and starting over speaks to the anger of feeling disenfranchised.
Yes, liberalism has an important historical significance. It also has a specific historical context. Unfortunately, many academics and intellectuals came to see it as a permanent, natural state; as the only paradigm that should, or even can, exist.
I think many people of today underestimate how popular the idea of “the end of history” was after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The idea that liberal “democracy” and capitalism represented the last and only sociopolitical/socioeconomic system humanity would ever need - that it was the culmination of all human history - was adopted by nearly every elite member of society. History was over, there was no alternative, and we shouldn’t try to develop humanity any further. Not only was any significant change unnecessary and undesirable, it was harmful and destructive. Human civilization had to stay in a permanent state of arrested development essentially forever.
This thinking was not restricted to just a vocal minority, it was the consensus, and with Marxism-Leninism defeated, there was no ideological opposition. Liberalism (neoliberalism, liberal democracy, capitalism) was the unquestioned champion and there were no more challengers.
But history had not ended, and no paradigm, however dominant, can remain in place permanently. Change is inevitable, humanity and civilization continue to evolve, and as new historical and material conditions emerge, so too will new ideas, just as liberalism did in its time and place.
Humanity is facing incredible challenges, and I’m not sure liberalism has all the tools necessary to adequately address all of them. Maybe no one ideology does. Maybe we need to take a post modern approach and look at all the different ideas and philosophies as tools in a tool box, and simply use whichever one we think might work best to address a specific problem. Then again, maybe humans don’t work that way, maybe the patchwork approach of “just do whatever works” is incompatible with a natural human desire to have a grand, unified, overarching ideological paradigm in place.
Regardless, I think liberalism’s ideological hegemony is rapidly falling apart. I fear it will be replaced by something worse, and by “worse” I mean even less sufficient for addressing the many challenges facing humanity today. I think that’s happening because liberalism became so entrenched, so rigid and so immovable. I just hope it’s not too late to come up with something better.
Rights are what we agree to as a society.
The things you’re describing aren’t real.
Well, I didn’t construct this description out of thin air. It’s based on how the concept of individual rights has been explained to me by various people over the years.
Natural rights vs positive rights debate depends on your personal secularity. If you believe first degree rights can only be emitted by unfalsifiable entities and you wish to keep those rights, then your stuck with those potentially undemocratic organisations who make questionable knowledge about those unfalsifiable entities. The alternative would be to accept that people can empower themselves and dismantle discrimination (ie rights) in democratic processes.
Give an example. That’d help
I don’t have a written record of every interaction I’ve ever had regarding this topic, unfortunately.
However, I’ve had a number of conversations or debates that have gone something like:
I will say that rights are essentially meaningless without a sufficiently strong state to enforce said rights, and they’ll reply that the state doesn’t grant rights, they can only take them away, and that the rights are theirs even if the state doesn’t recognize or enforce them. These conversations are usually with people who are very suspicious of state authority, even going so far as wanting to see the state abolished completely.
It’s kind of understandable, they’re usually American and one of the foundational documents of the US famously states that “…all men are…endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…” Every child in the US is taught this, more or less from birth.
So, you’ve been listening to stupid people.
Well, you weren’t around. In the future, I’ll be sure to consult you first.
It’s a type of social contract. In the traditionalist culture, being non-secular, they ascribed it to “God”, but, as you know, there is no God, so it was actually up to real people belonging to religious institutions, the clergy. Since the Enlightenment, people have tried to replace God with Nature; this has often been a bad joke with terrible consequences, but eventually secular paradigms took over and tried to reason the contracts into shape, to make them more consistent. There’s a lot of philosophy about this and I can’t summarize it as easily. But what you’re seeing today with Trump and the traditionalists, this anti-secularism, is a desire to return to the pre-Enlightenment state with its contracts and monarchy and aristocracy determined by “God”:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_chain_of_being
unfortunately, those are dignities, not rights. rights are a legal contract between you and your governing body. rights are granted. dignities are the things that are intrinsically connected to your personhood, your humanity, or both.
So if your governing body decides you don’t have rights, then you don’t have those rights.
unfortunately, yes. this understanding of what rights and dignities are is what fully converted me to anarchism/communism in college. since the government values greed over all other human forces, our rights will always be more restricted than our dignities. our only hope as common people with net worths south of 1 billion dollars is to resist every chance we get.
That is generally how rights work, yes. But not how rights for people who believe in a humanist moral outlook think should work.
precisely. when we talk about who runs the government and how they should operate it, we are generally (i can’t speak for everyone) trying to navigate getting the rights the government grants us to align as perfectly as possible with the dignities we possess