Discussion: Deciding Human Rights

[asterroc]

This came up on someone else's blog, and now I want to know what people think.

Viewpoint A: "Human rights should never be subject to a general vote. We should never allow the majority to oppress the minority."
Viewpoint B: "But how do we know what basic human rights *are*? Who defines them except the people, and therefore a popular vote?"

Discuss!

FWIW I ask these discussion questions when I'm uncertain of what I think on the topic and I want input to help me understand the nuances of it. As usual, I would appreciate it if vituperation was kept to a minimum, yadda yadda.

Comments

[jrtom.livejournal.com]

B.

Our concepts of what comprise "human rights", as well as those that are entitled to them, have evolved radically throughout history, and will continue to do so. We should not mistake ourselves for being at the pinnacle; it seems likely that future generations may judge us harshly for not granting rights that they deem obvious and necessary.

[gemini6ice.livejournal.com]

We should originally agree on basic rights as the founding blocks of a society (constitution, etc.), and the majority should always be able to elect additional human rights. The majority should never have the ability to demote a human right from being so. I see no justification that evolving society would convert any human rights into privileges, but an evolving society can always realize that a privilege should be a right (as our society is beginning to with healthcare).

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

Ah, but then is gay marriage a privilege that we could elect to turn into a right, or is it part of the basic right to marriage (which isn't actually enshrined in the constitution anyways)? And who decides?

[jrtom.livejournal.com]

I think that you're implicitly assuming that a society will never get significantly worse off than it currently is. To take your example of health care, if (to take an extreme example), the United States were to get severely nuked, any 'right' previously granted to access to health care might become meaningless. Larry Niven (and presumably others) has said that we have the ethics that we can afford--in the examples he's mentioned, criminals generally have rights that are proportional in their extent to the prosperity of the nation. Societies of a few hundred years ago could not have afforded to keep prisoners in the style to which today's US prisoners have become accustomed. (I'm not saying that that prison conditions today are cushy, or that they're unreasonably good. But the conditions are arguably better today than most people's living conditions were in 1200, anywhere in the world.)

What defines a 'right'? That is: what constraints, if any, should there be on what 'rights' that the majority may grant to itself? Is it OK for the majority to grant itself the right to imprison or impoverish a minority? (If not, on what ethical basis do we imprison people or ask them to pay fines which wipe them out?) Does it matter how the majority is constituted?

[q10.livejournal.com]

what if the majority elects a so-called ‘right’ the protection of which impairs something else that you consider a ‘right’? what if some of the people involved don't see the thing in question as a right at all? if we could agree on what kinds of things were or could be or should be human rights, your proposal would get us somewhere, but if we could agree on that we wouldn't have this problem. as it stands, most of the interesting debates in our society are framed, or can be framed, in terms of different people's ideas for conflicting rights - A's right to property against B's right to various forms of social insurance payed for in part by taxing A, or A's rights to property and freedom of association against B's right not to be be subject to certain kinds of discrimination, or A's right to free expression against B's right to be able to live a life where B doesn't have to be traumatized daily the extremely disturbing hardcore pornography painted onto the wall of A's house facing onto B's yard, or A's right to defend herself against perceived threats against B's right not to get fatally shot for getting lost at night and stumbling onto A's property by mistake. you may think some or all of these aren't or shouldn't be ‘real’ rights. i certainly don't believe in all of them, but if no ‘right’ can ever be taken away, then once the majority votes in one of the fake rights, it will stop the competing real right from getting enacted forever, unless the society is given the power to change its mind about what a right is, in which case no right can ever be completely safe.

[q10.livejournal.com]

this is something of a false dichotomy - we can believe that human rights have some reality independent of the political process if we like, but at the end of the day, some person or group of people, by some process, has to be in charge of identifying what the rights at hand are. in cases where we talk about human rights being put up for popular vote, what we usually really mean is that there's general disagreement in the society about whether the thing in question is really a human right. if there's such a dispute, then sooner or later it's going to have to come before some arbiter. a simple democratic process is not obviously the best arbiter, and it will eb wrong a lot of the time, but there's no arbiter that's obviously reliably better. even if we do conclude that some other institution should be the arbiter in general (which sounds good to me), that arbiter ought to have some eventual democratic accountability (perhaps quite remote, as is the case for, say, federal judges), because otherwise it'd be pretty foolish to trust the institution in question to remain even minimally well-intentioned.

if we had an oracle who was known to be always right about these things, life would be simpler, but, alas, we don't so we have to do our best with some process that we hope will let the side of truth and justice make it's case, and accept that, no matter what process we pick, sometimes things will come out the wrong way.

in the case at hand, it should be noted that the constitution of the state of California is way, way too easy to amend, and that a slightly different process would probably, on average, produce better results, but this means that the particular democratic process being used is suboptimal, not that some process systematically removed from democracy is a viable alternative. to be honest, though, i'm really disturbed by the ‘we should get them to find this constitutional amendment unconstitutional’ people - any constitution, most emphatically including that of the state of California, is going to be a rather flawed and limited document, and any court is vulnerable to the same kinds of biases, conflicts of interest, blind spots, temptations, and ulterior motives that all humans are vulnerable to. if a flaw in the constitution becomes unacceptable, but it's a flaw the courts are rather fond of, there needs to be some reliable procedure to override them, and the idea that we should trust the courts with the power to say ‘nope. sorry. that constitutional amendment doesn't count. end of story.’ shows a disturbing lack of foresight about the long-term implications of this kind of plan for institutional balances of power.

[q10.livejournal.com]

i should mention that the above is ignoring for the sake of simplicity the revision vs amendment business in CA, which might in this particular case make a state court action against prop 8 make sense, but which is largely independent of the broader conceptual issue you seem to be raising.

Scientific everything!

[blahblahboy.livejournal.com]

All human rights are fine until they start conflicting with each other. Then once the ideology crosses, you have three choices -- to vote, to ignore, or to go to war. If you fall in the majority, you want to vote (B). If you fall in the minority, you probably want to ignore (A). That's probably why you can't decide on one viewpoint, because you probably have viewpoints that are majority and minority opinions.

Let's go a little off topic. It might also be interesting to think of human rights as a random variable with some amount of variance. The more variance, the more different types of human rights are supportable by a society.

If this were true, I'd say that variance would be directly proportional to some size adjusted variance metric based on society's wealth. That means that two essential ingredients are needed for more human rights: a middle class, and a higher general standard of living.

At some point, new freedoms will become too expensive to implement and variance will cease to increase. At the same time, you need the middle class to be rich (happy) enough to tolerate the existing variance. This would be in the form of standard of living and wealth.

The corollary to this, I think, is that democracy is not for every country. I think I've had a few debates to whether or not democracy is the right government system for Iraq. Poorer societies may be better adapted to Communism, to account for the smaller variance in human rights their economy can support. Otherwise, you might get instability like coups (see: Thailand), which wind up destroying all human rights.

So of course, you could always not vote. There's always war. Zug zug!