Sterling Terrell

smart ideas from books (mostly)

Why Should We Care About Basic Human Rights?

Why Should We Care About Basic Human Rights?

Of course, here I am not saying that basic human rights do not exist, or do not matter.

I am saying that many of the people arguing about it do not have a foundation on which to put it.

“Should” or “Ought” are not words on which they have the ethos to stand.

Go ahead.

Give it a spin.

Using only physics, explain the difference between genocide and ant extermination.

Is one ethical and one not? Why or why not?

I’ll wait…

Or: Is it moral (ethical) for an ant to eat an aphid? Why or why not? Is it different for humans? Why?

Of course, we should care about human rights.

Because humans are something different – after all.

The idea that, without appealing to any court higher than the instincts themselves, we can yet find grounds for preferring one instinct above its fellows dies very hard. We grasp at useless words: we call it the ‘basic’, or ‘fundamental’, or ‘primal’, or ‘deepest’ instinct. It is of no avail. Either these words conceal a value judgement passed upon the instinct and therefore not derivable from it, or else they merely record its felt intensity, the frequency of its operation and its wide distribution. If the former, the whole attempt to base value upon instinct has been abandoned: if the latter, these observations about the quantitative aspects of a psychological event lead to no practical conclusion. It is the old dilemma. Either the premisses already concealed an imperative or the conclusion remains merely in the indicative.

-C.S. Lewis, The Abolition Of Man (Amazon)

Why I Don’t Like Talking About Human Rights

Why I Don’t Like Talking About Human Rights

I do not like talking about “human rights.”

Why?

Because most people don’t know the difference between an economic good and a non-economic good.

That’s why…

And most people (ignorantly) think that some economic goods should not be subject to the laws of economics.

Yeah, good luck with that.

You can ration goods by price, or by government decree – that’s it.

But nobody can talk rationally about these things…

Though “human rights” may be a concept deeply embedded in the intellectual and moral history of the West, Moyn contends that the proximate cause of its emergence was the felt need, especially by the Popes Pius XI and XII, to articulate an account of the position within the social order of the individual human being that avoided the errors of the communist model, the fascist model, and the model of romantic individualism. The primary instrument employed to shape this account was the philosophical/ theological concept of personalism, as articulated primarily by Emanuel Mounier and then by Jacques Maritain, before being appropriated for papal pronouncements.

-Alan Jacobs, The Year Of Our Lord 1943 (Amazon)

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