The best explanation I’ve found for “right” that seems to apply in the real world is “an extremely strong aversion to punishing acts of X with violence”.
I don’t think this definition conforms with what most people mean by “rights.” Assume an entirely nonviolent society. You try to vote. I throw your ballot away—nonviolently. What right do you have? I sell you a boat or a car or a house. You pay me money. I take the money and laugh in your face. Nonviolently. What recourse do you have?
Consider the example of criminal law. X has murdered someone. If X (predictably) resists imprisonment, I would say, use violence to subdue X. Would you not? X is in the group of humans who are “convicted criminals.” How does this conform with your original assertion that “When someone expresses doubts that a particular group of humans should be allowed certain rights they are attacking the concept of universal human rights in its entirety?”
This is not how the United Nations, for example, uses the term “universal human rights.”
I don’t see how any of those apply. In the first two, there are no rights on the part of the transgressor. No society recognizes a person’s right to throw away official ballots or to cheat others of their money, so there is no prohibition on using violence to prevent that. Rights never come into the picture at all, so I think we’ve had some miscommunication along the way.
In the third case, we use violence to subdue X not because he belongs to a group, but because we have determined (hopefully in a fair trial) that he has murdered someone. We now have strong enough justification to outweigh our aversion to taking away his freedom. The statement “We should always have an aversion to taking away freedom, but in this case we have important reasons to do so, and here they are” is not anywhere in the same category as “I doubt group Y should have a right to freedom”
On the one hand, a small part of me would like to discuss this further. On the other, I think this is becoming less relevant to the original post. Also—and this is critical for me personally—I’ve got some stuff to do in the real world now. I note that we cannot agree to disagree. But I gotta go. Best wishes (and I mean that totally sincerely, without sarcasm).
I think some of the confusion here might come from the fact that freedom from violence is often cast as a right—in which case we either have to make some awkward exceptions, or to draw an initiation/reaction distinction. This doesn’t seem like an insurmountable hurdle, though; societies frequently do both.
I don’t think this definition conforms with what most people mean by “rights.” Assume an entirely nonviolent society. You try to vote. I throw your ballot away—nonviolently. What right do you have? I sell you a boat or a car or a house. You pay me money. I take the money and laugh in your face. Nonviolently. What recourse do you have?
Consider the example of criminal law. X has murdered someone. If X (predictably) resists imprisonment, I would say, use violence to subdue X. Would you not? X is in the group of humans who are “convicted criminals.” How does this conform with your original assertion that “When someone expresses doubts that a particular group of humans should be allowed certain rights they are attacking the concept of universal human rights in its entirety?”
This is not how the United Nations, for example, uses the term “universal human rights.”
I don’t see how any of those apply. In the first two, there are no rights on the part of the transgressor. No society recognizes a person’s right to throw away official ballots or to cheat others of their money, so there is no prohibition on using violence to prevent that. Rights never come into the picture at all, so I think we’ve had some miscommunication along the way.
In the third case, we use violence to subdue X not because he belongs to a group, but because we have determined (hopefully in a fair trial) that he has murdered someone. We now have strong enough justification to outweigh our aversion to taking away his freedom. The statement “We should always have an aversion to taking away freedom, but in this case we have important reasons to do so, and here they are” is not anywhere in the same category as “I doubt group Y should have a right to freedom”
On the one hand, a small part of me would like to discuss this further. On the other, I think this is becoming less relevant to the original post. Also—and this is critical for me personally—I’ve got some stuff to do in the real world now. I note that we cannot agree to disagree. But I gotta go. Best wishes (and I mean that totally sincerely, without sarcasm).
I think some of the confusion here might come from the fact that freedom from violence is often cast as a right—in which case we either have to make some awkward exceptions, or to draw an initiation/reaction distinction. This doesn’t seem like an insurmountable hurdle, though; societies frequently do both.