Lots of good answers here, but one I haven’t seen is that some people have different value systems. They would be the ones that say “yes, human rights would be nice, but at what cost?”
Typically, as everyone here has pointed out, they value their own well being and comfort. “We can’t end child slave labor because then a KitKat would cost $20.” They might cite economic priorities, national or personal security, religious beliefs, or civic pride (see: China).
It always boils down to the same core belief: “It’s OK for some humans to suffer and die in indignity.” The cruelty is the point. Yes, it’s a different value system, but usually it’s about putting something other than humanity above everything else. Be it money, religion or ideology, it’s always about the idea that some material or conceptual object is more valuable than human life and dignity. The other face of that coin is dehumanization, which is the idea that, “yes all humans deserve basic rights, but did you see what they did? They obviously are animals who don’t deserve rights.”
Another common argument I’ve heard is regarding crime and criminals. Some politicians in my country tout that you cannot arrest criminals and we spend a fortune maintaining jails as if they were 5 star hotels. This is of course not true, but it does rail up the tough on crime crew who believe the only reason crime is rampant it is because it somehow allowed by human rights.
Since human rights are international agreements, it makes for an easy scape goat for those who believe in crazy conspiracy theories
“Since human rights are international agreements”
No they’re not. Not in philosophy and not even in international law.
You realise that’s not an actual agreement to do anything right?
I’m not a total buffoon.
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So, if children aren’t used as slave laborers, everything becomes more expensive.
Isn’t that just what things cost? I mean, I could get free produce if I stole it from the local produce market. There are plenty of morally gray areas where reasonable people can have legitimate disagreements, but we can all get behind making child slaves illegal.
But you’ll say it’s a slippery slope. First the child slaves, then maybe all the slaves? What about the sex slaves? Are we just supposed to stop letting rich people have sex with unwilling humans? Where doe it end? If everyone has rights and freedom and access to food, shelter, medical care, and education, how will a tiny fraction of the population amass mountains of wealth and power? How will they manage to orgasm without squeezing the life from a poor immugrant who has been forcibly hooked on drugs?
No, I don’t think boycotting cheap goods will create human rights in China and India. People will need to fight for human rights, and we, the privileged few who can afford to vote with our dollars, should demand fair trade foreign policies from our elected officials. We should vote for people who are for human rights everywhere. We should support policies that promote equality everywhere. And if that means we can’t buy cheap jeans at Walmart, we should be prepared to accept that as an inconvenience.
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That’s basically the right wing worldview in a nutshell. “Might makes right. Hierarchy instead of equality. Fuck you, I’ve got mine.”
Misunderstanding. For example it’s embarrassing how long I opposed feminism because I only read extreme scare stories about it, never realizing how much of what I took for granted in relationships between genders was a hard fought victory for feminism and all of us. Then when we had our first child, who were the only people standing up to say my company should have paternity leave? Feminists.
I have a more conservative brother who is very much against affirmative action. However he sees firsthand the results of blindly promoting people to meet diversity goals without regard to ability. Meanwhile I’ve been at companies who pay attention to both, resulting in a much more successful workplace
Or are we going political? Clearly the Palestinian situation is a crime against humanity, but do I oppose human rights by saying that is much more complex and it’s not as simple as Israel just stopping?
Or are we going political?
Not a political issue.
do I oppose human rights by saying that is much more complex and it’s not as simple as Israel just stopping?
Yes. This is a cowardly way of siding with the oppressor and (contrary to the question of this post) indirectly saying one is against not only human rights but also international law, in favor of one’s feelings, or to avoid the inconvenience of acknowledging a wrongdoing and not being moved to rectify it. In the least. Not even with words on an online forum.
There is no neutrality when it comes to human rights, you either support them or you are fine with some people not having them, in which case they are not a right.
Is it complicated for Russia to pull out of Ukraine and respect international law? Is it complicated because they have a historical right to that land? Is it complicated because Russia has the right to self defense against NATO encroachment? Do you condemn NATO? You and I personally, dear commenter, are not enemies by any definition of the word, but if the narrative has one excusing war crimes because “it’s complicated” then the narrative is our enemy. Should Hamas face an international court? Absolutely. Should Israel face an international court? Absolutely. Should all violence stop right this second? Absolutely. Our actions (or lack thereof) decide whether we live in a world of law or a world of brutal autocracy.
Yes. This is a cowardly way of siding with the oppressor and (contrary to the question of this post) indirectly saying one is against not only human rights but also international law, in favor of one’s feelings, or to avoid the inconvenience of acknowledging a wrongdoing and not being moved to rectify it. In the least. Not even with words on an online forum.
The reaching here to get an excuse to virtue signal is absolutely absurd
I doubt anyone you are talking to is opposed to all human rights, that sounds very much like a straw man statement. Reasonable people can disagree about whether any particular right should be protected by law.
The reason is simple: any legally-protected right you have stands in direct opposition to some other right that I could have:
- Your right to free speech is necessarily limited by my right to, among other things, freedom from slander/libel, right to a fair trial, right to free and fair elections, right to not be defrauded, etc.
- Your right to bodily autonomy can conflict with my right to health and safety when there is a global pandemic spreading and you refuse vaccination.
- Your property rights are curtailed by rules against environmental harm, discrimination, insider trading, etc.
No right is ever meant to be or can be absolute, and not all good government policy is based on rights. Turning a policy argument into one about human rights is not generally going to win the other person over, it’s akin to calling someone a racist because of their position on affirmative action. There’s no rational discussion that can be had after that point.
religion goes a long way to dehumanizing others, even in the same household
Normally, to be honest, it’s because they want to hurt someone. Look at the Conservatives in the UK, who are desperate to repeal human rights legislation so that they can send refugees to Rwanda without right of appeal.
Note that those Conservatives still think that they have human rights. Their excuse for depriving refugees of human rights is that some of them have entered the country illegally. Yet, none of them thinks any Conservative MP should be detained arbitrarily or deported, even though they now acknowledge that they, their government and their party have broken the law in various ways. No, they want to strip rights from other people. Their argument doesn’t wash.
“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition …There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect" - Frank Wilhoit
I feel like whenever a law like this is written, a coin should be flipped, and all of the people who voted to pass the law have that law applied to them based on the outcome of that coin flip. And that should be fine right? It’s a fair and equitable law, respecting human rights.
It’s like the classic traffic engineering joke, how do you get the speed limit increased? You rigorously enforce the speed limit where the The legislators live and drive
When two children are arguing about sharing something, the diplomatic adult has one of the children divide the thing into two piles, and the other child gets to choose which pile they want. We need to get more of that do unto others as you would have done unto yourself into politics
Right, it’s like when people try to justify colonialism. Would they be okay with their country being conquered and turned into a colony? No? Okay, so we’ve established colonialism is wrong. Everything after that is increasingly ludicrous special pleading. ‘Oh, but country X was more economically developed, so it was okay,’ is only a consistent argument if you actually go on to say ‘… and that’s why it would be a good thing if South Korea conquered Italy.’
This remibds of a police raid during the trump years in Kentucky. “They are hurting the wrong peole” said one woman as a mexican man was departed leaving his wife and kids behind.
Very mask off moment. Just admitting the role of law is harming some people.
There have always been such (it is human nature) - but right now they feel bold enough to speak and act, whereas previously they had been too afraid and embarrassed to do so publicly.
In South Carolina, various KKK-like groups said in advance that they wanted to kill people, wrapped barbed wire around baseball bats (in order to better kill people with), showed up to kill people, then actually killed people, then bragged about having killed people… Oh right, but the other side was not successful in securing a permit for their peaceful protest, so you know, there are “many sides” to every issue I guess.
Misinformation/brainwashing techniques are powerful. Like if you believed that a particular type of human was the root of all evil in this world, then you SHOULD want them dead, under those circumstances… right? You do not bc you know better, not just about that one group but more fundamentally that it is ideas that bring about evil, not people. But the people killing people do not know that, and it is to the advantage of others who seek power, and want to use the army of sheeple to advance their own agenda, for those sheeple to not know that either.
I guess because they think they are superior and forget that human rights include their own rights.
So yea, the “because they’re stupid” answer sums it up nicely.
Some people live in dangerous places and believe that treating criminals like human beings is the same as ignoring their crimes. These people believe that human rights should only be for those who deserve it by not harming the “good citizen”.
Part of it is disagreement over what should be a right. I have genuinely met people that belive rights like protest, movment, voting, legal rep, should not given they must be earned. So they are pro rights just a very limited list.
Example say “health care is a right” in the usa.
The ownerclass benefits from people not having protections. I don’t think you can put it any simpler than this. Slaves, child labour, debt cycles, prison labour, forced sex labour, all examples of none-existant or low protections.
I had this experience a short while back, and it really shook me. Granted, this was on the Internet, where people are more willing to say wild things or generally go mask-off, but I was downright flabbergasted. I’ll try to summarize the various arguments without inserting my own bias:
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because they view human rights as a social or legal concept, and not inherently more important than other social or legal principles
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because we as humans haven’t historically respected them, and don’t respect them universally even now, so demanding respect for human rights is a form of privilege
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because the idea of human rights requires a belief that humans have special dignity above that of other creatures (this one I found especially irksome, because I found the arguments denigrating to animal rights)
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because various groups advocating for human rights don’t agree on what those rights are, so blanket support for human rights is not something they can do
I’ll try to find the reddit post where this took place if I can. It was… it was something. If I’ve misrepresented any of the arguments above, it was not intentional but only because I find them so alien that I cannot understand them properly.
Found 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.
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.
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Because some people lack the empathetic skills to put themselves in a disadvantaged position. They can’t conceive of a world where they don’t have their current privileges.
When you have all the privilege, equal rights feels like a downgrade.
Some people even think they’re the ones in a disadvantaged position, even if they’re not, but they’ll always feel entitled to getting something when others get something.
I don’t quite understand this selfish entitlement, but I see it happen in many situations. It also applies to human rights for people on the other side of the globe, because from their perspective there is only one world, theirs.
Yeah, I think this touches upon equality of outcomes vs equality of opportunities which is always a vigerous debate.
Theres a lot of different ideas of what human rights should be. Abortion is the easiest example. Its a human right to abort, which to some is murder. In that case, it would make sense to be against to be against human rights, if you believe that right is to murder.
Or from the other perspective, pro life people see Abortion as violating the right to life.
Abortion is self defence, not murder.
Well no. The problem with all the comments here is that they all presuppose that whatever the commenter likes is a human right.
Someone against abortion would not say “I oppose human rights” they would say “abortion is not a human right” and more than likely “abortion violates human rights”.
Some people define things differently than reality has ascribed, what are rights, while others are just cruel.
Ever wonder why ghosts keep up with modern language trends?
