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Comment by jamestimmins | Hacker News Reader

I personally distinguish between 1)Human Rights, 2) rights as a member of a specific society, and 3) simply things that are "right" to do for peoples in the moral sense.

1. Something that can't be taken away by someone else.

2. A contract between an individual and the country/state with which they are a citizen. In return for paying taxes and following laws, they can expect services, utilities, military, education, etc.

3. These things are not something you're entitled to morally (like water, as there's no one to sue if you don't have water in your region), but societies should recognize the need for water, and thus it is moral and right to help ensure that all people have access.

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If you do that you're using words differently than many other people, the UN included. By your definition the right to a fair trial isn't a human right (which isn't a particularly widely held opinion).

But even still, the right to a fair trial is an explicit check on someone (i.e. the government) doing something bad to you (e.g. imprisoning you).

Positive rights are very much a real thing, but they're very different from negative rights, and they have very different implementation issues.

Using your definition, there's no such thing as human rights.

Life, liberty, and property are all things that are only guaranteed by societal standards and enforcement. Murder, theft, and enslavement is the norm where the rule of law and enshrinement of rights are absent.

Much of the US enslaved human beings for hundreds of years - liberty is clearly only something we get by being a member of a specific society.

Well my assumption is that liberty, life, and property are things that can be taken away.

edit: I may have misunderstood your comment. I mean that human rights are things that are violated by taking them away, not failing to give them to you. So while life can be taken from you, doing so would violate human rights. Whereas arguing that internet is a human right doesn't work with this model, because the current violation of that 'right' doesn't just result from someone taking something away, but from someone failing to give it to you.

You've got it backwards. Life, liberty, pursuit of happiness are inherent in being human. Governments can only take them away, they do not confer them.

> Life, liberty, pursuit of happiness are inherent in being human.

<Citation needed>.

The conventional Enlightenment-era arguments for natural rights, like those which inspired the American Founding Fathers, claimed that those natural rights were endowed by a Creator. Unfortunately, over the following two centuries-plus, fewer and fewer people accept the existence of a Creator that can endow such rights. Meanwhile, the study of homo sapiens as a social animal has proceeded apace, and it is clear to many – if not most – people today that “rights” are a rather arbitrary thing that human beings in groups posit for utilitarian reasons, but they have no foundation beyond that.

I agree that they are inherent, but it's not just governments that take them away, it's other people in general.

You could live in a totally government-free society and somebody, somewhere will eventually come along and fuck your shit up. Then you are just fighting to keep your rights, which for many might be preferable than trusting a government to do it for you.

The question is are you more likely to retain those rights under a government than without one? If so, what kind of government?

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