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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

> Unfortunately--unless I'm wildly mistaken--the very sad thing about American culture/politics is a lack of concern for the UNDoHR and everyone else on the planet.

It's not that Americans don't care about anyone else on the planet (I doubt they care less than people in Western European countries). It's that Americans aren't willing to bind their sovereign freedom of action. The idea of "human citizen[ship]" is anathama to American thought, because citizenship implies reciprocal rights and obligations, and Americans viscerally hate the idea of being obligated or beholden to anyone else. Hell, a lot of Americans think that the arrow should be pointed in the opposite direction: more state sovereignty (i.e. people within states should be less obligated to rules made by the federal government).

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To this American, you are only half right. I fully embrace the same natural rights for all people, regardless of nationality. I think my government is ethically constrained from violating the rights of all individuals, U.S. citizen or not. And yes, I support state sovereignty over the federal government.

Recognition of and respect for human rights need not be bound to sovereign freedom of action, as you put it. Freedom of action does not have to imply freedom to coerce.

I don't think most Americans would think of the situation in terms of "natural rights." They might think of Christian morality, in terms of how we should treat other people, but I don't think the Bible has much to say about search and seizure, or electronic privacy, etc.

And for myself, I don't like to argue in terms of any sort of thing, "natural rights" or "God's law" or whatever, that a doctor couldn't find if he cut me open and poked around. To me, the ability to act is the only thing that exists, and "rights" are just people in a community agreeing to use collective force to enforce whatever they decide to call "rights." The idea that the community as a whole can be bound to limit its ability to act with respect to people outside that compact is to me not a sensible thing.

And I think that while most Americans wouldn't phrase it precisely in that way, their thinking is along similar lines. We're a country that strenuously reserves the right to do whatever the hell we want, bound only by our own collective conscience. We want to do right by people, but we get to be the final arbiters of what's right and what is justified.

> I don't think most Americans would think of the situation in terms of "natural rights."

The folks who architected this nation most certainly did, and since they're the ones who devised the sovereignty of the states and embodied the individualism and self-reliance and runs undercurrent to your claim that Americans "hate the idea of being obligated or beholden to anyone else" I think it's perfectly fair to characterize the debate in those terms. And they did in fact see these as universal rights: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal..."

Anyways, specifically I take issue with your claim that "the idea of "human citizen[ship]" is anathama to American thought, because citizenship implies reciprocal rights and obligations." Obligations, yes, but it does not follow that the extension of our recognized rights to all people is in any way contradictory to our ideals, your personal views on collective rights notwithstanding.

You have to be careful mixing and matching bits and pieces of philosophy from different groups of people in different time periods. The framers did talk about natural rights, but you need look no further than their interactions with the American Indians to understand that when they talked about "natural rights" they were more referring to rights inherent to Englishmen than rights common to all humans. To put it glibly, do you think the framers would have objected to using drones against the American Indian threat?

> but it does not follow that the extension of our recognized rights to all people is in any way contradictory to our ideals

No matter what theory of the nature of rights you subscribe to, as a practical matter "rights" are limits on collective action. To say that, say, a non-American in Yemen has "rights" is to say that there are things that the American people, acting through Congress, cannot do. That is what is inconsistent with Americans' perceptions of the world. Not because we think people in Yemen are a lesser sort of human, but because Americans don't accept the idea that there is some higher power that can decide what America can and cannot do.

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