Comment by crassus

"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...