> Should those people work for free so that a poor persons rights are not violated?
Just because something is a human right, doesn't mean society (or whoever else) has to provide that for free.
Just because something is a human right, doesn't mean society (or whoever else) has to provide that for free.
The whole reason we have the concept of rights is that a social structure in which people do not have rights is an illegitimate one. An impoverished island nation which cannot afford to provide healthcare or internet access to its citizens is not illegitimate because of it.
I'm not saying this article is alone in diluting the meaning of a "right", it's been going on for years all around the world. That dilution, though, has made it basically useless as a concept.
As neither are true, it begs the question.
It's hardly any different than a family member who has a gambling problem, or drug addiction. Do you kick them to the curb? Or do you persist in making the best of a crappy situation? In most families it's a back and forth between making the best and punishing them in a persistent passive aggressive struggle.
And global politics is no different, no less messy. But having ethical standards is still not useless.
Article 26.
(1) Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.
> I'm not saying this article is alone in diluting the meaning of a "right", it's been going on for years all around the world. That dilution, though, has made it basically useless as a concept.
Therefore, rights only exist to guide and constrain what humans do, and any group of humans living together is a society.
I can assert rights to other people without being a member of human society. My right to the apple on the ground is the classic example.
The only people who aren't members of society live entirely alone 100% of the time.
Edited because I can't reply:
We've hit a definitional issue, and we're not going to be able to resolve it.
You know what definition I used, I know what definition you're using, so continuing is pointless.
All rights are social covenants provided by fellow humans.
Not by people, is the point. Rights only apply in terms of humans and human society, obviously.
That's simply just an absurd and frankly silly point. Stop arguing about what words should mean and pay attention to the message people are communicating. Rights are whatever society agrees they are, it's as simple as that, nothing more and nothing less; no rights are inherent. There is not "should", there is only what is.
But if "rights" encompass things that a perfectly just, well-intentioned society might very well _not be physically capable_ of providing, simply due to lack of resources, then what the hell is the point of calling something a "right" at all? What does that accomplish? What does that mean?
All I'm saying is that this new, pretty much meaningless definition we've given it of "stuff we want" is much less useful than the original.
And outdated and not accepted one. Don't be a prescriptivist, words don't have a single fixed meaning, just because Lock defined right to mean something long long ago doesn't mean that's what people mean when they use the word.
> If we decide it's this new, broader thing, then so be it.
That was decided by the masses long ago. Language evolves. This is not "new" nor is it meaningless. Rights means stuff we as a majority agree everyone should have, it's not less useful, and it's what rights have always actually meant. Anyone arguing about natural rights vs whatever is having a meaningless semantic argument with no one who matters. There are no natural rights, the concept is frankly silly; rights are inherently social in nature and have always been simply what people agree on.
Yes, I know. I agreed with that in the comment you're replying to.
> Rights means stuff we as a majority agree everyone should have, it's not less useful, and it's what rights have always actually meant.
If "rights" are just "things we want people to have", then why is "internet access" a right, but not a yacht or a penthouse apartment? Wouldn't we be happier if everyone had those?
I don't give a shit, really, if people go for a "Locke conception" of rights or whatever. I just don't really have a clue what it means anymore to say something is a "human right," if it includes super expensive stuff that a lot of countries can't afford.
Things we "agree" people should have. You won't find a majority of society agrees everyone should have a penthouse or a yacht, why... because rights are determined by reason and it's unreasonable to provide everyone with a penthouse and a yacht, it is not unreasonable to provide everyone with internet access. How do we define reasonable... through thoughtful discussion, debate, and law.
You're trying to cut the human out of the equation and have some way to define right that's internally logically self consistent, but people don't work that way. Agreement that something is reasonable is how humans work.
> I just don't really have a clue what it means anymore to say something is a "human right," i
I don't think that's true, I think you can perfectly well see how these things are defined, you just don't like it for some reason.
Nothing, that's rather the point I'm making, rights are not inherent, they are social agreements and are thus always up for renegotiation. You are agreeing with me.
That's not what the OP is doing, the OP is trying to claim something isn't a right because it doesn't fit his definition of the word, he's pulling a no true Scottsman on a thing saying it's not a right even though society agrees it is.
edit: and by that, I mean that it doesn't make sense to call the OP's argument absurd.
I don't believe that the OP is pulling a No True Scottsman. A No True Scottsman is really all about shifting your definition of a category in unprincipled ways in response to counter-examples. The OP is simply saying that many things other people call rights should not be.
I do think it's a fallacy to claim that, given the fluidity of language, there is therefore no meaningful concept that we might be trying to point to.
I do think there is a meaningful concept that the OP is trying to bring clarity on by restricting the meaning and usage of the word rights. I think the way the word "rights" is used today unhelpfully equivocates between different concepts and thus impoverishes our ability to think clearly about legal and policy issues.
Language may something that is negotiated, a social construct, but it is not arbitrary.
Oh, ok, yes he is and that's the problem, he's wrong. It's a stupid semantic debate where he's arguing over a word and everyone else is discussing what things we should guarantee everyone has. We call those things rights, whether the OP likes it or not, the issue at hand is what those rights should be, not what the word rights means.
And I would say that settling on a useful definition of the word is a great way to settle the question of actual policy. In this sense, the definition becomes a decision criteria.
The attempt to limit rights to categories like positive, negative, or natural is a pointless semantic debate that doesn't actually matter because law doesn't work that way, it works by consensus, which is messy and not always rational out of context of the history of the times they came to be. Quite simply, it's naive.
Something is a right if enough people say it is, period. No other criteria matters, never has, and never will. You either understand this, or you don't and engage is pointless debates telling people they can't use a particular word because you're too dumb to realize they're discussing a concept that exists independently of the word "right" and your attempt to forbid them from using the word "right" to represent that concept isn't going to change the concept they're discussing.
As soon as you say what rights ought to be, you've just excluded yourself from the discussion and started a semantic debate. There is no "ought", there is simply that which enough people agree to.
For the record, I'm not advocating for calling any of those things rights. Simply posing a question regarding the above statements.
Property, like money and other social constructs, require a society to recognise it. You can't "own" anything of other people don't recognise the fact that you own it. Which means you need society to govern who owns what.