Talk:Human rights

Proposal for a rewrite

An article on human rights should in my opinion contain the following elements:

• historical origins - the American Declaration of Independence, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man etc
• philosophical examination; do rights exist? (Bentham, Amartya Sen)
• current legislation and case law
• political aspects

Since the current article does not contain all of those elements, it should, in my opinion, be replaced by one that does.
Nick Gardner 05:58, 4 August 2012 (UTC)

I see the workgroups listed are Philosophy and Politics. I think Law should be added.

There's certainly a lot to cover. Peter Jackson 09:32, 4 August 2012 (UTC)

Cultural relativism

To me it seems that "human rights" has its legal and historical background as noted above. However, the "cultural relativism" criticism is a difficult one. It would appear that primitive concepts of inherent and inalienable rights is a fiction, pure and simple, and a real question of a practical nature is how much autonomy a system can allow its citizenry and still function according to its goals. Aside from the empirical question of how much autonomy is consistent with the continuing survival and evolution posed within the context of a particular system, there arises the larger empirical question about the relative merits of different systems, and just how the merits might be decided.

So "cultural relativism" is bang-on, and "human rights" as defined by the UN are not consistent with freedom of choice in one's political system, which should be a "human right", yes? John R. Brews 16:40, 15 August 2012 (UTC)

A simple example is the prohibition of state-run casino gambling. Is this a "human right" despite the historical advantages of societies that have disallowed it (e.g. Confucius (in his older days) said gambling was predatory), as measured by the material prosperity of their citizenry? Another example is education, which is a major source of disruption among the educated population that has no outlet for their enhanced abilities due to the lack of employment opportunity in "developed" societies, leading to unrest inimical to their stability, and therefore to attempts to suppress education (apart from teaching of the technical skills necessary to keep food production and power generation operational) and to promote sound-bite thinking in its place. Forgive the evident bias here, these are just examples that can be considered as indicative of the issues. John R. Brews 16:58, 15 August 2012 (UTC)