NOTE: Emails are correspondence and we all know, that our emails are shared with governments...
The argument seems to be that we have rights because the UN says so. Who or what endowed the UN (or anyone else) with the prerogative to declare human rights?
Let's imagine a that the UN would change its mind and declares the right to eternal salvation, and mandates that every state submit to the authority of the holy see.
If the current rights are "true" human rights, and the right to salvation is a "false" human right, what sets them apart given that the UN in this hypothetical scenario declares them both? How do rights become true or false?
Not «true or false»: part of the "social contract".
If two people (or groups) are arguing over whether something is part of the social contract, how can we tell which of them is correct?
This also seems to go against the spirit of human rights. How can we motivate minority rights in a society that feels justified persecuting minorities (i.e. in a society where minority rights are not part of the social contract)?
might makes right. That has always been the case in nature, because it's the only way that worked so far.
Of course this is a bit circular reasoning because this works only if everyone abides by these rules, so in practice protects only against relatively 'mild' infringements and situations (i.e. the people are expected to be reasonable enough not to vote extremists in power... if not, all bets are off but that's true of all laws)
It's self feeding problem. The only solution is slowly to deny government power over people.
Historically, "might" correlated near perfectly with "population size". From Sumer onward, the size of your army & slave count determined right-making (in the UN sense). Exceptions due to technology innovations were sparse and short-lived.
Therefore subsequent evolution has been mostly around how to manage large groups of humans, through "social contracts" and various domestication measures. The social configurations that managed better, won over those that did worse.
In other words, huge centralized states have been a huge evolutionary success. There are pretty much no independent ("sovereign" when it comes to right-making, UN or otherwise) small groups of humans any more, they got all gobbled up by superstates.
But I wonder if our institutions have fully caught up to the fact that the number of humans is near-irrelevant now. With the right technology, a small group can dominate millions, billions. And their necessary supply chain is tiny, relative to the purported UN jurisdiction – by a factor of at least 1000x.
So "democracy as right making" is at DIRECT ODDS with "might as right making". I wonder how this clash between where the power resides (technology and its homeostatic supply chain) and where people think it resides (themselves and their divine individuality) will play out. The emperor has no clothes.
What?! The contract is defined in its normative constitution. It's written! It's dynamic - your service provider sends you an update to the contract: you don't like it, you cease rapport.
The issue we have today is with the relative lack of options.
In the case of the DoHR: once accepted, that is part of the contract. Effectiveness to be defined (for example, inconsistencies with a [Statal legal] Constitution are noted by a higher court which can nullify proposed laws).
The UN declaration holds power precisely because it is a declaration, members agree on it.
Life is not a computer program or a math equation.
Rules do have exception, especially in complicated systems like "the entire world".
If by "this is a useless set of rules" you are saying "oh, c'mon! This is not the law"... then yeah, you're right. It's not legally binding. It says so in the first paragraphs of Wikipedia. But it was useful to others as a framework and model.
How can we complain about western countries violating our privacy defined by some ruleset defined by organisation that decided it's a good idea to make genocidal state member of a human rights council of said organisation.
It is the framework used for creating things that are binding: laws.
Even so, something someone else does can "violate my personal beliefs", even if they're not really legally binding. Nothing strange about that.
Saying "something violates human rights" is a shortcut to saying "Something violates a set of rules that are the framework of our societies, and those rules are important enough that they managed to seep into our laws and influence our thought, and our world. We should pay attention to that violation, and maybe crack down on it."
> How can we complain about western countries violating our privacy defined by some ruleset defined by organisation that decided it's a good idea to make genocidal state member of a human rights council of said organisation.
Literally by doing it. Just because the UN is not perfect, doesn't mean it automatically retroactively invalidates a certain text that we hold to a high standard.
The current state of the UN really makes no difference on the text itself. Even if someone in the UN goes wacko and decides to rewrite the text, we still have a previous copy. Just fork it.
and failed miserably at doing any of that.
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> The argument seems to be that we have rights because the UN says so.
That's not the argument. The reasons we have human rights is because individual countries decided to implement them.
The Universal Declaration itself is not legally binding. It's just an agreement that participating countries decided to implement into their own laws.
UN can't force countries who didn't vote into it to implement. They can't even force countries who actually voted for it to implement it.
However, individual countries have the freedom to complain or stop trading with countries who don't implement, or on countries that implement but don't follow. Out of the things that countries do to each other, this seems like a minor thing.
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> Who or what endowed the UN (or anyone else) with the prerogative to declare human rights?
Nobody.
Anyone can declare human rights. I've declared a few myself yesterday during tea time.
The Universal Declaration carries its weight because it was made and approved by the countries themselves who took part in the UN at a certain time. It's not as if some crazy person at the UN has the power to change something in the document at their will. And even if they did, so what?
People routinely suggest new human rights and some people agree and others disagree. There is no higher court or secret world parliament deciding your life.
You asked "How do rights become true or false?". Well, by becoming new laws in individual countries.
If neither is correct (or both simultaneously), is it even a meaningful statement about the world to declare a human right like Tor does?
Yes. Tor is correct and Facebook is wrong. I said it. Other people might say otherwise, but I'll say they're wrong. (and they are)
In societies it is normal to have disagreements.
What people do is discuss the issue and potentially reach an agreement. Maybe this will become a law somewhere. Maybe it will go into the Universal Declaration, and most countries will implement it. Maybe not. After becoming a law, people will either follow it or not. If they sort of break the law, a judge or peers will decide if they need punishment. Maybe they do, maybe they don't. Who knows.
Life is not a computer program or math equation. Life is a bit hard.
If you tell me the angular sum of a triangle is 180 degrees, I cannot see it directly with my senses, but I can construct a simple proof with pen and paper that shows me it cannot be any other way than what you told me.
How do you experience the truth of the human right to privacy?
Societies are much more complex than that.
I can try to convince you that this is right, if that's what you're asking. But no, there won't be a math equation or an scientific measurement that proves that it is correct. Because we're humans, not numbers or bits.
I can't touch something like a social contract or an ideological standpoint, I don't know where it is are or how long it's been there, when it happened, how intense it is, whether it has any properties, whether it was caused or can cause; these things don't appear to be like anything that in any sense can be said to exist. If these things are gods, then for the sake of this conversation let's call my position an agnostic one.
Society is complex, but even complex things are built from the parts we can see and touch, and since our senses are the only means we have for interacting with the world, even impossibly complex things must somehow be relatable back to them (unless there is some additional channel in which knowledge enters our minds?).
If something is so nebulous that it is completely built from things we can't experience in any way other than being told about them, then how can they be said to exist at all, how could we tell this tale apart from complete fiction?
What do you mean by "prove"? You can easily extend your skepticism to any body of knowledge. The empirical sciences ought not be given a free pass merely because of some unexamined (and incoherent) prejudice like scientism.
Everything can be said to be a matter of opinion, so that does nothing to clarify the subject.
The bigger question here is: why does a moral statement can only be valid when it's valid in absolute? Why does it have to have a proof that's easy enough for a person that's willingly choosing to ignore knowledge?
Why do we assert that this-and-that is a human right in such a context?
Also, the "is-ought" problem follows from a particular (very problematic) metaphysics. It does not follow from an Aristotelian understanding of metaphysics.
Why is it problematic?
> It does not follow from an Aristotelian understanding of metaphysics.
Aristotle's metaphysics does also carry some baggage. It is contingent on an unmoved mover/active intellect that creates not only motion but purpose in the universe.
Although his ethics can broadly be taken at face value as long as you agree with the proposition that your purpose is to flourish as a human. It does seem to work pretty well, although the question he was truly answering was how to be a happy individual, whereas the meaning of ethics has shifted over the millennia to deal more with civic virtues than personal ones.
No, it flows from propositional logic, which is not a metaphysics. You can't have an “ought” conclusion with only “is” premises.
A metaphysics may assume “ought” axioms and thus support “ought” conclusions from only “is” additional bases, but then you still aren't getting an “ought” from an “is”, you are getting it from the “ought” you assumed with your metaphysics.
All you're saying here is that we've agreed on a principle that implies what you're saying is true. This is the exact same as what the other commenter is saying.
They killed Socrates for asking too many of these types of questions.
This is the opposite of Socrates. He started from the premise that he knew nothing. In this discussion here, you're asking questions from the premise that already know most things about the subject. Also, this is not why Socrates was killed, please do some reading instead of jumping on another meme.
Also: comparing yourself to Socrates for asking fallacious questions is peak Hacker News. Don't think I ever saw such arrogance.
I merely just wished to have a discussion on how we do determine what right "should be" a human right, and what makes it a human right, or simply, a right to begin with? It is actually quite a lengthy topic, and for example Rothbard has written a lot on how human rights are property rights and so forth. We could have gotten to animal's rights as well! I suppose one could brush it all under the rug with the term "subjective", but I would rather not stop there.
But in any case, this is my only defense for the OP. I have no idea how one would "experience the truth" of a human right, I would need some more answers before I get to know what the OP has meant by it exactly.
As for the Socrates stuff, I have no comment on that.
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Allow me to quote some Rothbard:
> There are several aspects of this important truth. In the first place, each individual, according to our understanding of the natural order of things, is the owner of himself, the ruler of his own person. Preservation of this self-ownership is essential for the proper development and well-being of man. The human rights of the person are, in effect, a recognition of each man’s inalienable property right over his own being; and from this property right stems his right to the material goods that he has produced. A man’s right to personal freedom, then, is his property right in himself.
> But there is another sense in which human rights are really property rights, a sense which is much obscured in our time. Take, for example, the human right of freedom of assembly. Suppose that a certain group wants to demonstrate for a particular idea or bill in a street meeting. This is an expression of the right of assembly.
> On the other hand, suppose that the police break up the meeting on the ground that traffic is being disrupted. Now, it is not sufficient simply to say that the right of assembly has been abridged by the police for political reasons. Possibly, this was the case. But there is a real problem here, for maybe traffic was disrupted. In that case, how is one to decide between the human right of free assembly and the "public policy" or "public good" of clear and unobstructed traffic?
> In the face of this apparent conflict, many people conclude that rights must be relative rather than absolute and have to be curbed sometimes for the common good.
Taken from https://fee.org/articles/human-rights-are-property-rights/.
Feel free to call BS on it. Kinda is. Ultimately it's the human might that supports rights.
Can a country create a right for more living space for some of its citizens?
The social significance depends on how the believers act. Some discipline themselves, some try to persuade others, some start a war, some try to push through legislations.
That is precisely the reason why some highly controversial UN resolutions were passed right after the second world war. It's almost ironic that China now wields so much more power over the path the UN is taking than the old colonial powers.
But whenever people say this or that is a human right, we ought to remember that a lot of the things that are legally defined as human rights were at some point defined by some old colonial overlord until it wasn't. The founders of the UN definitely didn't think that people of any colour were the same or that interracial marriage is a human right.
One thing is for sure, despite one of its own Supreme Court jurists championing the idea of a "right to privacy",1 America now has some of the poorest privacy protection, culturally and legally, of any country. This intended disregard for privacy today puts money in many Americans' pockets, particularly the Silicon Valley crowd.
1 https://archive.org/stream/jstor-1321160/1321160_djvu.txt
Was talking to someone in their 80's in the US about the telephone service they had as a child. Operators could listen in on calls.
But did they. Honest question.
Operators certainly were not jumping into a call and injecting advertising. Nor were they recording metadata, e.g., who someone's contacts are, call history, etc., to support an advertising service.
Operators sometimes knew callers personally IRL. This older person was telling me she knew her local operator and one time when she called someone twice in the same day, her friend the operator asked her why she was caling the same person again. "You just called her."
Operators could also make free calls and some did.
Did people back then have a better concept of privacy than young people today who have been brainwashed by SV.
But the issue here is the selective enforcement of these rules.
It's similar to geneva convention. You can't break it if you're not in war but only in "armed conflict".
The list of things that the UN has agreed to are values not because they are expedient or nice to have, but because they have been generally proven to be hallmarks of civilised life. Losing a right to privacy is much, much scarier than people having private facets of their lives.
And, if appeals to authority is what it takes to get people to agree to good ideas, then the UN is telling them these things are really good ideas. Better than whatever looks like a good idea in the short term then turns out not to be.
The answer in this thread appears to be - if enough of a majority of people in power say its true, then its true.
But if you're looking for natural rights you can perceive through your senses (which you have indicated elsewhere in this thread), then you have a bad understanding of reality. You already believe in a number of intangible "things" which you've never perceived...like the notion that things must be perceivable through the senses to be considered real. This is a principle, a false principle, but something that is nonetheless taken by you to be true about reality. Otherwise, what are you even talking about?
[0] But you're also asking a question that's a bit out of context. We are appealing to endoxa and the violations of privacy we are witnessing are unjustified given the general agreement about privacy as a right.
[1] Not to nitpick since the essential question still stands, but since you mentioned the Holy See...
> declares the right to eternal salvation, and mandates that every state submit to the authority of the holy see.
Catholics do not believe they have a right to salvation. Salvation is a gratuitous gift of God, in fact so gratuitous that good works alone cannot deserve it and faith is needed.
Here's how: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratification
There are attempts at infringing on privacy, yes, but we also see attempts at making privacy absolute, and I think the Tor Project is part of that trend.
The realistic and reasonable approach is a trade-off, as has always been the case. Usually this takes the form of strong legal protections of privacy but with exceptions controlled by the courts (e.g. warrants for searches and interception of communications) and parliaments.