Human Rights: A Tentative Thesis

Starting Wednesday the 28th of September I will begin taking a class at the University of Washington (along with other classes) which is entitled the Philosophy of Human Rights. This is an introductory class that will involve reading a reader (a "reader" is a book which contains various essays, articles and portions of longer works such as treatises on given subtopics that comprise a larger topic, such as Human Rights, Ethics, or Epistemology) The Philosophy of Human Rights edited by Patrick Hayden. This book seems to be fairly decent as a text, although some of the snippets of Locke and Hobbes are a bit too short.

The text, however, is not what I am here to talk about. Instead I would like to put forth a few thoughts concerning the issue of human rights and perhaps a tentative thesis on where my thoughts currently are. Throughout the duration of the course I hope to summarize various portions of the text here for purposes of reflection and organization of my thoughts, though they will certainly be primitive.

To begin, I would like to start with my tentative statement that it appears as though human beings do not actually have rights. One of the primary reasons I hold this belief is that I have yet to find a place in the Bible where human rights are emphasized or even acknowledged. Given that I consider the Bible to be inspired (in some way) and as such a truthful historical account of the interaction between God and humanity, I take that it is an authoritative source on providing accurate information of how humans can relate to God. In this relationship it appears as though human beings are told very little in the Bible of what they deserve and are instead called to belief in God, obedience to whatever system they have received from Him (whether it be the Mosaic law, or circumcision, or a growth a development of our relationship with God through Christ and with other people), and to recognize or moral responsibilities. It is hard to justify a reading of the importance of human rights in the Bible when God chose to let the Israelites be subject to Egyptian captivity and slavery for 400 years.

This having been said, I am still open to the idea that human rights exist, at least in some form. In fact, it is precisely here where I would begin my inquiry into human rights; that is, by asking the questions: What is a “right” and why should I think that human beings have them? I do not necessarily see any problem in answering these questions by saying that human rights do not actually exist but they are a useful fiction, yet if we are to do this then I think it is important for us to at least acknowledge this to be the case. In other words, if it is not true that human rights exist, yet we are going to say they do anyway, then it would be critical for us to be honest about this so as to not delude ourselves about the true nature of human beings in relationship to each other and their environment.

Besides the (seeming) lack of important placed on human rights in the Bible, another reason I have difficulty in believing that they exist is that I have never heard or read an adequate answer to either of the two questions posed above with a justification for why the answer is true (but perhaps I will as a result of the class I am taking). Hence someone might respond to them by saying something like, “Humans have rights because they have inherent value,” and I would then ask why our having value means that we have rights. I might give the counterexample of saying that pleasure has inherent value, but that it would be difficult to assign a right to a rather immaterial or “abstract” concept such as pleasure. It could potentially have inherent value because pleasure can be pursued for no other reason than the sake of pleasure (in other words, its value is derived from itself and not other things, thus making it inherent), and this would demonstrate that it does not follow from something having inherent value that it necessarily has rights. This is only one example, as I read more theories on human rights I will be able to contribute more thoughts on the difficulty with conceptual analysis and human rights (with defining the terms used in theories of human rights). It is also possible that pleasure does not have inherent value and my counterexample does not work, but it was mainly intended to illustrate a difficulty in defining human rights rather than to be a philosophically rigorous statement.

Another difficulty I have (and this is related to the objection above) is with the way in which Americans seem to be discovering new rights on a rather frequent basis. 2000 years ago it was not likely considered a right for women to have abortions, for all people to vote, for citizens to have healthcare, or for people to live on the streets of a city if they do not desire to have any house of their own. Today many different groups are either contending that these rights do exist, or that they do not. My problem with these contentions is the idea that we are suddenly discovering these “rights” to exist, yet I have to ask where they have been all this time and how we are now able to know that they are there. If someone wants to claim that the right to an abortion has always existed but that we have not recognized until very recently, I would like to know under which rock it was hiding when we found it, and why – if it did in fact exist – we did not see it earlier. Many people treat rights as though they are the legitimate discovery of the extension of the inherent value of human beings (i.e. the fact that I am a male human being - non-criminal - over the age of 18 and an American citizen gives me a right to vote), yet I do not see how so many rights that range over so many issues can be rationally justified by either empirical or a priori support.

All this having been said, I will still attempt to remain open to any sound ideas and arguments around the issue of human rights.