Description
Inherent Human Rights?
Subjectively, every single human deserves the right to have the ability to achieve their potential. To have access to the means necessary to accomplish what they are capable of. Be it education, production of humans or goods, products, or ideas. All humans deserve to have access to education, healthcare, food, water, shelter etc. It is an investment in global economy to assist all humans to achieve their full potential because when realized, they can then put back into the world a profitable commodity.
What is this “the right, to have rights” ( DeGooyer, et. al. 2018)?
From the moment of our birth (which is dependent on at least two other humans to create and one other human to deliver, mindful, I mean the person delivering), we are dependent as humans. Helpless infants destined for death without the protection or care of at least one other being (does not necessarily have to be human). So, what is this inalienable right? Human right? Our entire existence is predicated on the existence of others. We are born with nothing, not even the ability to survive, how is it then that we are born with rights as a human? How is it that we are born entitled to anything other than what we ourselves can produce/accomplish? (Which is nothing as an infant). Human rights are dependent on the existence of not only other humans but also of an authoritative body that can then protect and enforce those rights.
“The decisive factor is that these rights and the human dignity they bestow should remain valid and real if only a single human being existed on earth; they are independent of human plurality and should remain valid even if a human being is expelled from the human community” (DeGooyer, et. al. 2018). If there were no other humans on earth, please someone explain to me how that single human would need human rights? Human rights are necessities in the face of humans, not of nature. The very act of living amongst other humans is what mandates the need for rights.
“The power of a nation that makes law effective is also unopposable (irresisibel), and there is no rightfully constituted commonwealth without the power to put down all internal resistance, for such resistance would have to derive from a maxim that, if made universal, would destroy all civil constitutions, thus annihilating the only state in which men possess rights” (Kant, 1985)”. Last week, in a response I posted, I detailed all the capital punishment laws by state. Treason was on nearly all of them. Treason is not merely rebellion against an institution, treason is the disregard and questioning of all those powers that give any authority to any rights a human within a nation-state may conceive to have. I cannot help but agree that Kant is a realist, acknowledging that without law and the state, nation-state, there would be no rights. You can accept/demand all the rights as a human you wish to have but without a power to enforce them what do you have?
DeGooyer, S., Hunt, A., Maxwell, L., Moyn, S., & Taylor, A. (2018). The right to have rights. Verso.
Kant, I. 1983. Perpetual Peace and Other Essays.
