The Problem With Human Rights

Voices:

Works quoted:
John Rawls - Le Monde, 30th November 1993

[MasterrFlamaster]

The footage of The Golden One flexing, combined with a serious explanation of the concept of justice in Roman law has to be the ultimate pinnacle of Youtube as a medium XD

[anemoneAnomalia]

so, what you're saying is, we really *DO* live in a society

[waywaywayf]

"ideas don't just float around in the heavens"
*plato laughing in the distance*

[homestuck_official]

This is a really good take but the title makes it look like a muscular dragon is about to preach me on why sending 5 year olds to coal mines is good actually

[meman]

Growing up, my Dad always said, "The police aren't here to protect you, they're here to protect property."

[ThePainkiller]

00:32 absolutely. When someone says "it's just common sense" what they actually mean is "my biases are the objective truth"

[RealityPeace]

To paraphrase George Carlin, 'I guess God was doing sloppy work that week, because he had to go back amend that Bill of Rights 27 times.' and 'You have no rights folks, you have privileges. Temporary privileges."

[JustCarlT]

Christians weren’t the first to conceptualize the soul. Plato also spoke often of the immortal soul as a foundation for his arguments on the Good and Just.

[rodrigomachado]

"Chinese With Socialist Characteristics" is my favorite patreon... don't know him personally, never talked with him/her online... but that name...

[huntersullivan]

Your description of rights as a tool of the powerful is something I've never thought of before. It reminds of a passage in Dostoevsky's The Idiot, wherein the group of rebellious youths break into the luncheon and start demanding their rights be recognized without having thought on hat it means to have rights, or what they are to begin with. Also, I would like to say that your use of Nietzsche always makes me happy given his typical treatment by leftist oriented folk. Thanks for the excellent video.

[-mb]

It's rare when someone's content brings a smile to my face with anticipation. Yours does that every single time, without fail. Thanks for bringing a little more light and contemplation to this afternoon!

[HxHDRA]

"Whenever we feel that some notion or idea is impossible to do without there is a kind of therapy we can utilize: it's called history."- CP

[McDonaldsCalifornia]

I live in Austria and we have a very powerful social safety net that is how you point out the institutionalised result of countless often violent class struggles in the past. Nowadays people take these rights and privileges for granted and forgot that they had to be fought for and instead vote for parties that erode our social safety net in the name of neoliberal ideology.

[windowsism]

A spooky critique of human rights near Halloween


Stirner's ghost sends his regards

[petersmythe]

How to make a libertarian genuinely scared:
"I believe in positive liberty."

[MANTARD]

So basically 'human rights' is the closed system that the state allows infinite movement within?

[alexbuhl]

at some point "self-evident" was "god-given" instead; they just wanted to make it atheist- and future-proof

[vladkrakov]

Also, as Derrick Bell pointed out, human rights are always procedural and never substantive, i.e. they do not guarantee you the right to meet your physiological needs (food, water, shelter, sociality, etc) but only to abstract, state-managed processes which are only vaguely connected to what your body, mind, and spirit actually require to be happy and healthy.

[TheLG]

I really liked how you posed your argument. In the video, you mention how once the State grants people rights, they can simply just take them away when it becomes inconvenient, or when the group that was protected by those rights can do nothing about it. I studied law in Venezuela, and the Venezuelan Constitution includes a mention to the "progressive nature of rights", which means that once the State recognizes a right, it cannot take it away, unless it makes the effective exercise of another right impossible.

It is true that the State can still do whatever it pleases (in fact that's what it does), and I know that this "progressive nature" limit doesn't solve the fundamental issue, but on paper it seems like a better idea than not having that limit. I know life isn't lived on paper but I wonder what the viewers of this video might think.

[JohntheDuncan]

So I'm a PhD researcher studying the relationship between human rights, neoliberalism and austerity and I have to say this is some sloppy material here. Like, I am not an uncritical supporter of human rights by any stretch but there's just a lot of issues with this video. For example, your history of human rights suggests that specifically "human rights" emerged with Lockean social contract and property rights but this is just not the case. Perhaps that could be seen as a moment of the emergence of property rights but it's separate from the emergence of "human" rights which can only really be seen to emerge from 1948 or probably more accurately in the 70s with the establishment of the associated legal covenants. So when we talk about the history of human rights we're really talking about a very short period. Extending beyond that like saying "the US and France were the first states to declare human rights" is just inaccurate. There are rhetorical similarities between the two discourses and there was influence but they are absolutely different phenomena and most researchers in human rights would make that point. Also, where are you finding the human right to humanitarian intervention? That doesn't even make sense within the framework of human rights because the state cannot claim a human rights. Only the individual or groups can. Unless you make the argument that when article 28 of the UDHR says that "everyone has the right to live in an international system that best realises human rights" then it justifies action against states and systems that are seen to not hold up those rights and that is related to power. But similarly it could be used to justify revolution against a capitalist system under which human rights could never be truly realised. Or are you talking about the responsibility to protect doctrine which is not directly a human rights but an international extra legal norm which is separate from them? Plus, you make no mention of economic and social human rights which include the right to unionise and the right to education and a whole host of other rights that imply in their execution at the very least mitigation of capitalism and I think if their discursive power was utilised properly could be used as powerful critiques against capitalism itself. Economic and social rights also emerged not from the Lockean or US revolutionary tradition but from a socialist one and were only allowed into the UDHR because of a massive compromise between the Western and Soviet Blocks. Like, the UK spent ages trying to entirely block ECSR because it was thought they were trying to force revolution.


Sorry for the rant but this is my area and the information your presenting is frankly often just inaccurate. You have some interesting points about the presupposition of the state and there is something there with the individualisation effect of human rights but even that is massively contested. Like I say, I'm not an uncritical supporter of human rights discourse but I'd recommend reading up on the sociology of human rights because this is simplistic and often just inaccurate