Comment by nohuck13
13 years ago
Agreed, although I don't mind so much whether they are making money off it- anyone making money off promoting freedom of speech is welcome to promote free speech as a human right.
But there's an issue of basic human right inflation thats slightly distasteful. Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom to own property without it being arbitrarily taken away for you by someone stronger. Those are basic human rights, and they don't have to be provided at someone else's cost.
I'm a strong supporter of an individual right to healthcare, provided by society/government, but that's a right agreed by social contract... Saying it in stronger terms risks devaluing in a a real way the more basic rights, which billions of people don't have.
Maybe I'm being pedantic given that this is PR copy...
Edit: carbocation said this 15 minutes ago, oops, upvoted
Who grants basic rights? If they're God-given, perhaps they're immutable. Nature grants no rights, and is perfectly willing to stand by idle while we slaughter each other by the millions.
The alternative is that basic rights are agreed upon by the society, and as the society matures and evolves, why shouldn't its understanding of what basic rights are change?
They're certainly not immutable, and do not exist outside of the context of a society. If you're alone, you have no rights whatsoever; they're something we "recognize" (or not) in other people.
The language we use is probably based on ideas that they supernaturally-granted or something like that... which is silliness, but I don't think we should change the habitual phrasings... people are more likely to treat each other humanely if they believe that rights are, you know rights, and the language encourages that.
What rights do you think have changed?
Do rights change, or does the expression of a right change? I believe everyone has a right to an education. Obviously that education will have changed from 4000BCE to 2013. What about the right to create and choose family? How does that intertwine with society's thoughts about homosexuality?
I guess a good answer to that question would be a PhD dissertation, not a HN comment. I wish I knew the answer, or that it was easy for me to express.
1 reply →
"Rights" are the repackaging of religion for the secular age[1]. I know this is controversial because it is heretical, but consider the correspondence. Rights have no physical existence, only a social existence. Rights only matter through the exact same mechanisms that the wrath of Allah matters - if enough people believe in it and are motivated by it then it has force. In the past, Christian missionaries spread religion to the world with books, words, charity, and occasionally the sword. Today, the post-Christian West spreads human rights to the world through dollars and bullets (the carrots and sticks of foreign policy).
By imagining new human rights, a corporation marks themselves as a member of the ultra-religious, sort of the pharisees of our day. Not only do they obey God's commands, but they invent new commands to follow and by this show off their righteousness. Yes, this stance is made to atone for the sin of making profit - which is a minor sin in the West - "it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to inherit the kingdom of God" after all. Do not be mislead, liberalism (including the "classical liberalism" of Locke and Jefferson) is Christianity without God. Jefferson's Bible makes the point explicit.
Making new human rights is good business. A college education became a human right sometime in the last 50 years and today over $200 billion is spent on tuition each year in the USA alone. Yes, it is disingenuous, but also quite clever, for a corporation to position their product as a new human right.
Even the negative rights (freedom of speech, rights to property, etc.) require the positive right to protective services for those rights to have meaning. If we examine the history of such rights, we find they are rooted in English tradition. Essentially the modern idea of human rights is an idealization of 18th century English law. But "human rights" philosophy gives that law a mystical existence and rightness aside from the specific historical balance of power that led to its creation.
[1] What follows is ripped straight out of Nietzsche and Moldbug. Grazie, signori. I can recommend Moldbug's masterful trilogy on Idealism, which includes the weird new atheist religion-like philosophies:
a) http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/04/why-do-...
b) http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/05/idealis...
c) http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/05/our-pla...