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

[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.