Comment on Why would someone openly say that they oppose human rights?
Nemo@slrpnk.net 11 months agoFound the reddit link now I’m off work. I tried to reread it but I got to the part where someone asserted that antebellum chattal slaves didn’t have human rights and got too angry / frustrated / disgusted to keep going.
r/AskALiberal question “Do you believe in natural rights?”
InB4 “that’s natural rights not human rights”: I know the terms aren’t synonyms, but the concepts overlap so heavily, and some of the replies to the question were so vehement, that they read to me as a rejection of the validity of human rights as a concept in part or in total. I’m willing to be corrected on this, but if it gets heated I will (advance warning) probably get emotionally overwhelmed and need a long time to compose a reply.
jasory@programming.dev 10 months ago
That’s mostly just a bunch of different people using different definitions of “natural rights”.
Many people seem to think that natural rights are ones granted by nature, but in actual philosophy nobody cares about this. Clearly wild animals or inanimate objects don’t grant humans rights, it’s what basis humans consider to be the source of a right. A natural right would be a right granted to you by another human based on the nature of your existence. It is a special consideration towards you on the basis that you are a human.
And the “divine right of kings” origin story is ridiculous, the concept of natural rights was not invented to justify monarchy or God.