> These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.
As if the purposes and principles of the United Nations will always be aligned with transcendent human rights. It almost brings high aim of the whole document down a little.
Even if I try to read it charitably, I can't make much sense out of what that means. It doesn't sound like "we of the United Nations will never betray these ideals". A bit of nothing at best.
I'd read it as saying "you're only permitted these rights and freedoms when you use them for good, not for evil". For instance, you can't appeal to freedom of expression (Article 19) for attacking others' reputation (Article 12). Basically the same idea as Article 30.
But then what is "good" and what is "evil"? Is that from the perspective of the UN? And I find the excerpt in question a weird way to express that rights shouldn't be used against others. I agree with the principle, but I wouldn't write it anything like how it is in the excerpt.
Well, obviously they couldn't use "good" vs. "evil" directly, so I read it as trying to express the same thing with "concordant with the purposes and principles of the UN" vs. "contrary to the purposes and principles of the UN", such that the scope of permitted acts is intentionally very broad.
A lot of people read this document as some kind of secular analogue to a religious text, and forget that it was the product of a diplomatic negotiation, and like many such documents, intentionally includes vague, ambiguous, and even contradictory clauses, so that each government voting for it can tell themselves that it means what they want it to mean
Having equal rights doesn't mean that everybody has equal say in laws. Basically what I mean is a person in a legislature can vote for a bill to become a law. I, not being a member of a legislature, can't vote for the bill. That doesn't mean I don't have equal rights to the politician.
On a side note, a large number of kings have no or nearly no power nowadays so it tends to be more of a symbolic thing
When I was born, I had the same right as everyone else born that day to become a MP. There was nothing in the laws of my country saying: this child can not be an MP because it was born in the wrong family. The poorest child born that day and richest child have the same rights (so much as the law is concerned).
A royal child, though, has, by law (by law!), many more rights than me, chief among them being ascending to a position of power because it was born in the right family.
I’m not a monarchist, but couldn’t you say the same thing about people born in other countries to yours? (eg: that they have fewer rights in your country than you)
>When I was born, I had the same right as everyone else born that day to become a MP.
Is there a monarchical country that doesn't allow the monarch to choose an heir that is not their child? Just because something is unlikely to happen doesn't mean it can't happen. It is quite unlikely you become a politician as well.
>There was nothing in the laws of my country saying: this child can not be an MP because it was born in the wrong family
>A royal child, though, has, by law (by law!), many more rights than me, chief among them being ascending to a position of power because it was born in the right family
I don't know about MPs but various countries require the president to have a parent that is already a citizen or requires them to have been born in that country.
Doesn't really seem any different. Being born in the right place or in the right family is required to have certain roles in society in democratic societies as well.
If we were to take your argument to the logical conclusion it is a human rights violation that we don't allow some poor person in Timbuktu to become the prime minister of Spain. Why should he have his rights violated just because he was born to a family who just so happened to be in another country?
Do people in Western countries who call themselves “monarchists” really judge their own beliefs by definitions invented by liberals? I’m not familiar with anyone who calls themselves that so I’m all ears.
I live in Australia. The King of Australia is essentially a symbolic figurehead with no real power – he doesn't even live here. As such, how does that symbolic role, in itself, imply that some humans are not "born free" or are not "equal in dignity and rights"?
In principle, I'd support replacing the monarchy with a Republic – although, like in the 1999 referendum (which I was too young to vote in), I might vote "No" to a republic if I disagreed with the details of the specific Republic on offer.
But, either way, I don't think this has much to do with human rights. Obviously we aren't all "born equal" in a factual sense – a person born to wealthy parents gets a head start in life which a person born to parents of modest means lacks – but few would argue that such inequalities, in themselves, necessarily violate human rights. The equality it is talking about here is an abstract legal equality. And, to be honest, I'm sceptical that the inheritance of the office of a symbolic figurehead head of state, which only remains in existence due to the support or apathy of voters, actually violates that abstract legal equality, any more than the obvious inequality between a billionaire's child and a welfare recipient's child does.
Australia's constitution doesn't have a Bill of Rights, yes. They tried to introduce one in 1988, but it failed in a referendum [0]
However, it isn't true that it contains no individual rights. Expressly, it grants three federal rights (meaning they don't bind the states, only the federal government): religious freedom, trial by jury, and compensation on just terms in cases of expropriation / eminent domain. It also expressly grants two rights which do bind both state and federally: right to interstate free trade, and prohibition of discrimination based on state of residence.
Furthermore, the High Court of Australia has read certain rights as "implicit" in its text, most famously the "implied right to political communication", which is a weaker version of the US First Amendment (since it only applies in political matters, not purely artistic expression). It also ruled that bills of attainder are unconstitutional – not on the grounds of individual rights, rather because they violate the separation of powers doctrine (determining the guilt of individuals is the exclusive competence of the judiciary, not the legislature).
So it isn't true that the Australian constitution has zero protection for individual rights. It is true that those protections are much weaker than under the US federal constitution.
However, there are also non-constitutional protections for human rights. For example, Australia has banned the death penalty nationwide. States cannot legally reintroduce it even if they wanted to. This is because Australia ratified an international treaty banning the death penalty (Second Optional Protocol to the ICCPR). And then there is a provision in the Australian constitution which permits federal legislation to enforce a treaty, and so the Australian Parliament used that to ban the states from having a death penalty–at the time of the federal ban, they'd all already repealed it anyway. It isn't constitutionally entrenched – there is nothing legally stopping a future federal Parliament from repealing that law - although in practice that seems very unlikely. So one could argue this is a case in which Australian law gives people more rights than US law does (the right not to be executed).
Another example is when, in 1994, the federal Parliament legalised homosexuality nationwide, overturning the state of Tasmania's criminalisation of it. This was also done under the treaty / external relations power, in response to a UN Human Rights Committee decision that Tasmania's criminalisation of it violated the ICCPR [1]. The same procedure means the federal Parliament can enforce any other future decisions by human rights treaty bodies against the states – if there is political will to do so.
Also, just like the US, state laws and constitutions can grant you additional rights on top of the federal ones. For example, the state of Victoria has a human rights charter [2] although that is not part of the state constitution, just ordinary legislation; and it does not grant courts power to strike down legislation, but it does say courts must interpret other legislation (wherever possible) to make it compatible with the charter.
One of the most appealing parts of monarchism is how it encourages practical compromises. There’s no need to create a deep theoretical basis for policy decisions.
There’s no distinction in the UNDHR between negative and positive rights [1]. Many people (especially, but not only libertarians) don’t regard positive rights as true human rights. They may be human 'goods' but they are not human 'rights'. They would agree with Articles 1 to 21, but disagree with Articles 22 to 30.
Personally I think human rights are largely a legal fiction anyway — they are invented, not natural. “inalienable rights” and “born free and equal in dignity and rights” are a pretty fantasy.
(Also by the way, Article 26.1 “Elementary education shall be compulsory” directly contradicts Article 3 “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.”)
Positive/negative rights is a useful distinction when talking about concrete implementation details, but its utility fades when talking about what ought to be where it tends to get put forth axiomatically. Layered complexity creates logical contradictions, whereby even though a right might not be specifically infringed in the negative sense, it still has been effectively nullified constructively. This list is not meant as a basic legal implementation, but rather is useful as a list of metrics for evaluating societal outcomes. Thus it's less important whether its ideals have been arrived at by explicit government guarantee, or through free association and general prosperity.
If you don’t believe in a higher power, “rights” are a pure social construct. Both positive rights and negative rights are nothing more than what people with guns are willing to do for you.
I disagree that the issue is actually about a "higher power" (theism). It is really about naturalism. I'm sceptical of claims that anyone can convincingly ground objective ethics in naturalism. But, there are also non-naturalist atheisms (e.g. some versions of Buddhism, the British idealist philosopher John McTaggart) – and whether non-naturalist atheism can successfully ground objective ethics is a very different, and largely independent, question.
I don’t know if I understand the difference you’re trying to articulate. The enlightenment concept of individual “natural rights” arose in the context of Christianity. The existence of a supernatural order provides a logical basis for the concept of rights.
I think you need some notion of a supernatural order—maybe it looks quite different from Christianity or Islam—for the concept of rights to make sense. If you really believe that we’re meatbags and experiencing various chemical interactions as consciousness, what’s the basis for saying that bag of meat has “rights?”
> The enlightenment concept of individual “natural rights” arose in the context of Christianity
"Natural rights" arose out of the natural law tradition, which is often said to have first been clearly expressed by Aquinas. But Aquinas drew heavily on pagan ancient Greek thinkers (especially Aristotle), and also Islamic and Jewish philosophy. Even though it arose in a Christian context, it was never essentially Christian, I think it is better viewed as part of the classical Western philosophical tradition which transcends the boundaries between ancient Paganism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Indeed, Aquinas' views on this have a lot of overlap with those of the Māturīdī school of Sunni theology.
And even though Aquinas was a Christian (indeed, a Catholic monk and priest), his theories about "natural law" are not inherently theistic. He claims that every natural being (all animals and plants, even inanimate natural objects such as rocks or stars) has an essence, a nature – and that, in the case of human beings, our essence/nature implies the existence of certain objective moral rights and duties. Of course, Aquinas believes that God created that essence/nature, and that it is somehow a limited reflection of God's essence/nature – but those further theistic claims are not essential to his natural law theory as such. A person could rationally believe in a human essence/nature, and that ethics can be objectively grounded in it, without believing in God. Hence, the real problem with contemporary naturalist atheism, is not its atheism as such, it is its anti-essentialism, the rejection of the Platonic/Aristotelian idea of a really existent human nature.
> I think you need some notion of a supernatural order—maybe it looks quite different from Christianity or Islam—for the concept of rights to make sense
Buddhists traditionally ground ethics in the Buddhist dharma, which is asserted to be timeless, eternal. The natural-vs-supernatural distinction is a Western concept which is alien to traditional Buddhism, but traditional Buddhist accounts of "dharma" are very hard to square with modern naturalism. Of course, there are some contemporary Buddhists who will try, but they end up producing something which has significant differences from Buddhism as it was traditionally understood. But, Buddhists also reject any concept of any ultimate God – Buddhism traditionally accepts the polytheistic gods of Hinduism as real, but views them as finite, limited, mortal entities – and hence they are atheists with respect to the ultimate God of the Abrahamic religions.
> If you really believe that we’re meatbags and experiencing various chemical interactions as consciousness, what’s the basis for saying that bag of meat has “rights?”
I agree. But my point is, the ethical difficulties of that viewpoint are due to its naturalism/materialism/physicalism, rather than its atheism per se.
I think Grotius may well have agreed with rayiner on this? As well as a founding figure in international law, Grotius was a Dutch Reformed theologian, who played a major role in the Arminian-Calvinist dispute (on the Arminian side).
> Many people (especially, but not only libertarians) don’t regard positive rights as true human rights. They may be human 'goods' but they are not human 'rights'
People can "regard" anything as anything, but why should anyone else care what they "regard"?
> Personally I think human rights are largely a legal fiction anyway — they are invented, not natural
Some schools of jurisprudence – e.g. legal positivism, legal realism – view law as fundamentally disconnected from ethics: either ethics is subjective, or even if it is somehow objective, it is a separate sphere with no inherent legal relevance. That seems to align with your claim that human rights law is "invented, not natural"–but, what then makes it a "legal fiction"? We speak of corporate personhood as a "legal fiction" because we are taking a term "person" and stretching it far beyond its non-legal meaning; I don't think "human rights", even under a positivist/realist reading, involves any such stretching.
Conversely, other schools – e.g. natural law theory – presuppose the existence of objective ethics, and view law's fundamental purpose as to serve ethics (even if inevitably imperfectly). From that perspective, humans have ethical rights and duties, natural law rights and duties; and human rights law, as a field of positive law, should be judged on the basis of how well it conforms to natural law.
That is an example of a terribly written Wikipedia article. It speaks of "positive rights" being "initially proposed in 1979 by the Czech jurist Karel Vašák", but then goes on to quote 19th century philosopher Frédéric Bastiat discussing them.
As usual, Stanford has a much better article – https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberty-positive-negative... – which says that the "The idea of distinguishing between a negative and a positive sense of the term ‘liberty’ goes back at least to Kant..." – although leaving open the question of whether "positive vs negative liberty" and "positive vs negative rights" are synonymous or distinct.
> People can "regard" anything as anything, but why should anyone else care what they "regard”?
Why indeed? Why, for example, did you write several paragraphs about it and link to a long article about philosophers’ opinions? Why should anyone care what you or they think?
Clearly people do care, not least because the UDHR comes from the UN, and if it is not as universal as it purports to be, then why would we expect countries to respect it?
> Why indeed? Why, for example, did you write several paragraphs about it and link to a long article about philosophers’ opinions? Why should anyone care what you or they think?
I don't think anyone should care what I think.
In terms of philosophers, they put forward arguments for their positions, and we should judge their positions based on the quality of their arguments. So, what is the argument for the claim "only negative rights are true human rights"?
> Clearly people do care, not least because the UDHR comes from the UN, and if it is not as universal as it purports to be, then why would we expect countries to respect it?
Many millions of people worldwide don't care about the UDHR. The people who care the most about it seem to be adherents to some form of liberal internationalism which views the UN as having inherent moral authority.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 107 ms ] thread> These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.
As if the purposes and principles of the United Nations will always be aligned with transcendent human rights. It almost brings high aim of the whole document down a little.
Article 1: "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights."
How do you square your support for kings when it goes a fundamental human right, that all human beings are born equal in dignity and rights?
Having equal rights doesn't mean that everybody has equal say in laws. Basically what I mean is a person in a legislature can vote for a bill to become a law. I, not being a member of a legislature, can't vote for the bill. That doesn't mean I don't have equal rights to the politician.
On a side note, a large number of kings have no or nearly no power nowadays so it tends to be more of a symbolic thing
A royal child, though, has, by law (by law!), many more rights than me, chief among them being ascending to a position of power because it was born in the right family.
Is there a monarchical country that doesn't allow the monarch to choose an heir that is not their child? Just because something is unlikely to happen doesn't mean it can't happen. It is quite unlikely you become a politician as well.
>There was nothing in the laws of my country saying: this child can not be an MP because it was born in the wrong family
>A royal child, though, has, by law (by law!), many more rights than me, chief among them being ascending to a position of power because it was born in the right family
I don't know about MPs but various countries require the president to have a parent that is already a citizen or requires them to have been born in that country.
Doesn't really seem any different. Being born in the right place or in the right family is required to have certain roles in society in democratic societies as well.
If we were to take your argument to the logical conclusion it is a human rights violation that we don't allow some poor person in Timbuktu to become the prime minister of Spain. Why should he have his rights violated just because he was born to a family who just so happened to be in another country?
Maybe i have a simplistic view but a right is something that cannot be denied. Do I have the right to become a NBA player?
IMO people are too quick nowadays in calling everything "a right".
Both Kings and citizens have the right to own property. They just differ in the property they own.
(apologies to Anatole France)
In principle, I'd support replacing the monarchy with a Republic – although, like in the 1999 referendum (which I was too young to vote in), I might vote "No" to a republic if I disagreed with the details of the specific Republic on offer.
But, either way, I don't think this has much to do with human rights. Obviously we aren't all "born equal" in a factual sense – a person born to wealthy parents gets a head start in life which a person born to parents of modest means lacks – but few would argue that such inequalities, in themselves, necessarily violate human rights. The equality it is talking about here is an abstract legal equality. And, to be honest, I'm sceptical that the inheritance of the office of a symbolic figurehead head of state, which only remains in existence due to the support or apathy of voters, actually violates that abstract legal equality, any more than the obvious inequality between a billionaire's child and a welfare recipient's child does.
Instead it focuses on good government and democratic accountability. No bill of rights, but mandatory elections.
Is that true? Does that distinction have much meaning?
However, it isn't true that it contains no individual rights. Expressly, it grants three federal rights (meaning they don't bind the states, only the federal government): religious freedom, trial by jury, and compensation on just terms in cases of expropriation / eminent domain. It also expressly grants two rights which do bind both state and federally: right to interstate free trade, and prohibition of discrimination based on state of residence.
Furthermore, the High Court of Australia has read certain rights as "implicit" in its text, most famously the "implied right to political communication", which is a weaker version of the US First Amendment (since it only applies in political matters, not purely artistic expression). It also ruled that bills of attainder are unconstitutional – not on the grounds of individual rights, rather because they violate the separation of powers doctrine (determining the guilt of individuals is the exclusive competence of the judiciary, not the legislature).
So it isn't true that the Australian constitution has zero protection for individual rights. It is true that those protections are much weaker than under the US federal constitution.
However, there are also non-constitutional protections for human rights. For example, Australia has banned the death penalty nationwide. States cannot legally reintroduce it even if they wanted to. This is because Australia ratified an international treaty banning the death penalty (Second Optional Protocol to the ICCPR). And then there is a provision in the Australian constitution which permits federal legislation to enforce a treaty, and so the Australian Parliament used that to ban the states from having a death penalty–at the time of the federal ban, they'd all already repealed it anyway. It isn't constitutionally entrenched – there is nothing legally stopping a future federal Parliament from repealing that law - although in practice that seems very unlikely. So one could argue this is a case in which Australian law gives people more rights than US law does (the right not to be executed).
Another example is when, in 1994, the federal Parliament legalised homosexuality nationwide, overturning the state of Tasmania's criminalisation of it. This was also done under the treaty / external relations power, in response to a UN Human Rights Committee decision that Tasmania's criminalisation of it violated the ICCPR [1]. The same procedure means the federal Parliament can enforce any other future decisions by human rights treaty bodies against the states – if there is political will to do so.
Also, just like the US, state laws and constitutions can grant you additional rights on top of the federal ones. For example, the state of Victoria has a human rights charter [2] although that is not part of the state constitution, just ordinary legislation; and it does not grant courts power to strike down legislation, but it does say courts must interpret other legislation (wherever possible) to make it compatible with the charter.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1988_Australian_referendum_(Ri...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toonen_v._Australia
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_of_Human_Rights_and_Re...
One of the most appealing parts of monarchism is how it encourages practical compromises. There’s no need to create a deep theoretical basis for policy decisions.
That includes human rights laws.
Personally I think human rights are largely a legal fiction anyway — they are invented, not natural. “inalienable rights” and “born free and equal in dignity and rights” are a pretty fantasy.
(Also by the way, Article 26.1 “Elementary education shall be compulsory” directly contradicts Article 3 “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.”)
1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_and_positive_rights
I think you need some notion of a supernatural order—maybe it looks quite different from Christianity or Islam—for the concept of rights to make sense. If you really believe that we’re meatbags and experiencing various chemical interactions as consciousness, what’s the basis for saying that bag of meat has “rights?”
"Natural rights" arose out of the natural law tradition, which is often said to have first been clearly expressed by Aquinas. But Aquinas drew heavily on pagan ancient Greek thinkers (especially Aristotle), and also Islamic and Jewish philosophy. Even though it arose in a Christian context, it was never essentially Christian, I think it is better viewed as part of the classical Western philosophical tradition which transcends the boundaries between ancient Paganism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Indeed, Aquinas' views on this have a lot of overlap with those of the Māturīdī school of Sunni theology.
And even though Aquinas was a Christian (indeed, a Catholic monk and priest), his theories about "natural law" are not inherently theistic. He claims that every natural being (all animals and plants, even inanimate natural objects such as rocks or stars) has an essence, a nature – and that, in the case of human beings, our essence/nature implies the existence of certain objective moral rights and duties. Of course, Aquinas believes that God created that essence/nature, and that it is somehow a limited reflection of God's essence/nature – but those further theistic claims are not essential to his natural law theory as such. A person could rationally believe in a human essence/nature, and that ethics can be objectively grounded in it, without believing in God. Hence, the real problem with contemporary naturalist atheism, is not its atheism as such, it is its anti-essentialism, the rejection of the Platonic/Aristotelian idea of a really existent human nature.
> I think you need some notion of a supernatural order—maybe it looks quite different from Christianity or Islam—for the concept of rights to make sense
Buddhists traditionally ground ethics in the Buddhist dharma, which is asserted to be timeless, eternal. The natural-vs-supernatural distinction is a Western concept which is alien to traditional Buddhism, but traditional Buddhist accounts of "dharma" are very hard to square with modern naturalism. Of course, there are some contemporary Buddhists who will try, but they end up producing something which has significant differences from Buddhism as it was traditionally understood. But, Buddhists also reject any concept of any ultimate God – Buddhism traditionally accepts the polytheistic gods of Hinduism as real, but views them as finite, limited, mortal entities – and hence they are atheists with respect to the ultimate God of the Abrahamic religions.
> If you really believe that we’re meatbags and experiencing various chemical interactions as consciousness, what’s the basis for saying that bag of meat has “rights?”
I agree. But my point is, the ethical difficulties of that viewpoint are due to its naturalism/materialism/physicalism, rather than its atheism per se.
(I'm not like a Grotius scholar or anything, I'm just reading _The Internationalists_).
Whatever you mean, that applies to anything that could be called a right, not just "human" rights.
People can "regard" anything as anything, but why should anyone else care what they "regard"?
> Personally I think human rights are largely a legal fiction anyway — they are invented, not natural
Some schools of jurisprudence – e.g. legal positivism, legal realism – view law as fundamentally disconnected from ethics: either ethics is subjective, or even if it is somehow objective, it is a separate sphere with no inherent legal relevance. That seems to align with your claim that human rights law is "invented, not natural"–but, what then makes it a "legal fiction"? We speak of corporate personhood as a "legal fiction" because we are taking a term "person" and stretching it far beyond its non-legal meaning; I don't think "human rights", even under a positivist/realist reading, involves any such stretching.
Conversely, other schools – e.g. natural law theory – presuppose the existence of objective ethics, and view law's fundamental purpose as to serve ethics (even if inevitably imperfectly). From that perspective, humans have ethical rights and duties, natural law rights and duties; and human rights law, as a field of positive law, should be judged on the basis of how well it conforms to natural law.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_and_positive_rights
That is an example of a terribly written Wikipedia article. It speaks of "positive rights" being "initially proposed in 1979 by the Czech jurist Karel Vašák", but then goes on to quote 19th century philosopher Frédéric Bastiat discussing them.
As usual, Stanford has a much better article – https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberty-positive-negative... – which says that the "The idea of distinguishing between a negative and a positive sense of the term ‘liberty’ goes back at least to Kant..." – although leaving open the question of whether "positive vs negative liberty" and "positive vs negative rights" are synonymous or distinct.
Why indeed? Why, for example, did you write several paragraphs about it and link to a long article about philosophers’ opinions? Why should anyone care what you or they think?
Clearly people do care, not least because the UDHR comes from the UN, and if it is not as universal as it purports to be, then why would we expect countries to respect it?
I don't think anyone should care what I think.
In terms of philosophers, they put forward arguments for their positions, and we should judge their positions based on the quality of their arguments. So, what is the argument for the claim "only negative rights are true human rights"?
> Clearly people do care, not least because the UDHR comes from the UN, and if it is not as universal as it purports to be, then why would we expect countries to respect it?
Many millions of people worldwide don't care about the UDHR. The people who care the most about it seem to be adherents to some form of liberal internationalism which views the UN as having inherent moral authority.
This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.