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Comment by dbatten | Hacker News Reader

Of course it's in the UN's declaration... I just disagree philosophically with the UN's declaration.

Human rights, in my mind, are something that existed before the UN, and exist independent of the UN. And there's centuries of political philosophy that agree with me on that point. See, for example language like "endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights" in the US Declaration of Independence. That tradition of political philosophy sees rights as inherent to humanity (in this case God-given, but it doesn't have to be), not guaranteed by some statement of a government or group of governments.

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> See, for example language like "endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights" in the US Declaration of Independence

For many thinkers in the years following the founding of the United States, precisely this language has been the fatal flaw of the “natural rights” approach. What if the world has moved on and no one can take seriously the notion that there is a Creator which has endowed men with rights? Even for the American Founding Fathers, those Deists among them were already well aware that this phrasing was a mere rhetorical flourish, it didn’t actually mean anything.

In the absence of a Creator who endowed men with rights, we can only view "rights" as a convenient fiction that humankind, as a social animal, proposes for mutual benefit. And in that case, a representative democracy’s decision to see housing as a human right is pretty straightforward.

Interesting! This seems to be the crux of the disagreement. What thinkers are you referencing? I'd love to read them.

At first blush, my thought is that you could still create a secular argument for natural rights, but I'm open to being persuaded otherwise.

I'm aware of the discourse in the US, and I think I can agree to everything you said in the second paragraph - though I can't see how housing not being a right can follow from rights being unalienable?

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