Our lives are full of artificial constructs we adopt to make them better. Human Rights is just one of them.

Money is not a real thing. It is an idea represented by a coin or a bill. The only reason it has value is that we all agree it has value. If the agreement changes (e.g. inflation) the value of the money changes. When people stop agreeing that it has any value the money becomes worthless, except, perhaps, to a collector. Yet we spend a significant amount of our time accumulating this non-real thing, because it makes our lives better and allows civilization to function.

Marriage. It’s a legal concept, not a real, physical thing, yet we treat it as real because it helps society function.

Is the same with rights. If we treat them as real they become as real as money and marriage. If we don’t life becomes nasty and short.

Posted: November 14th 2009

See all questions answered by Dave Hitt

Why is it that theists claim that they have superior morals and yet can still ask questions like this?

If belief in god is all that compels you to treat other humans decently, then please retain that belief.

(I’m assuming a theist asked the question from the tone. If it’s an atheist, you have my apologies.)

The answer to your question is both simple and complex.

The simple answer is that it that some moral rules are hardwired into us by evolution. Humans are more successful in small groups than they are by themselves and human young require years of investment, so our genes push us towards acting in certain ways. There’s a ton of research on the evolution of cooperation in animals and of morality in humans.

I think human rights is just an extension of that evolved morality, made by adding a little human thought.

And then very roughly and imperfectly codified through the laws in societies.

For me, I consider human rights to be pretty fundamental to the kind of society in which I would like to live, so that’s why I respect them. That’s my rational explanation, some of which is hard-wired into me, some of which came from my parents, and some of which is my own.

There is an assumption in the question that there’s an alternative to humans developing concepts of human rights. I don’t know what that could be – religions have a truly abysmal record on human rights – if you look for support of slavery, torture, capital punishment, and discrimination you pretty much find that supporters have a religious basis for their belief. Conversely, if you look at the human right’s groups, you will find that the majority of them are secular.

So, the real answer is that they should be respected because we should have empathy and compassion for every human no matter where they are.

If, for example, you don’t find it troubling that the US has killed somewhere between 100,000 and 1,000,000 Iraqis in the past decade (or so), I think there’s something wrong with you.

Posted: November 12th 2009

See all questions answered by Eric_PK

You could argue that human rights relies on a circular argument: we need to respect the rights of people because … people have rights! In that sense, “human rights” is indeed an artificial construct, a human invention. The idea that it is somehow an “absolute” is also a human construct, but one not supported by any evidence.

If “rights” were somehow natural or absolute, you could look elsewhere in nature and find them there too – but you don’t. You don’t see other animals exhibiting anything like the same concern, for others in their species, as humans do for other humans. When Darwin wrote about “Nature red in tooth and claw”, he was acknowledging there are no “rights” in nature, and it really is all about “survival of the fittest”. However, he was also clear on the way we “civilized” humans have evolved to think about more than mere survival:

With highly civilised nations continued progress depends in a subordinate degree on natural selection; for such nations do not supplant and exterminate one another as do savage tribes.

In other words: we are no longer slaves to natural selection. We can invent an abstract concept, such as human rights, and use it to better ourselves as a species.

Posted: November 12th 2009

See all questions answered by brian thomson

So the only reason why you don’t go out and kill is because your sky daddy tells you not to? If so, I find that horrifying, but I doubt that it is why you refrain from doing harm to others. You do not harm people because it is something you do not want to do. You do not want to do it because you can obviously see that the other person feels pain and that person has rights just on the basis that she/he is a human, including not having her/his person violated. This is not rocket science.

It is not a question of making this concept up as from thin air, for the pure whimsy of it, because it grows out of our relating with each other while utilizing the empathy that evolution has given us. In other words, the selfish gene leads to the altruistic society.

The religious mind often seems stuck in an absolute rut. Absolute this, absolute that; if it is not absolute it has no meaning. The fear of the slippery slope fallacy hardly ever leaves religious believers. If they do not follow a set of rigid rules which despite often not making sense or are even adequate in certain situations, they feel like they are doing something wrong, that they are sliding down a slope that will lead into unspeakable evil.

Many religious believers have difficulty in handling ethical situations as they arise—they demand and crave the easy, banal way out, that is, the same approach to all situations despite their individual nature and complexity while ignoring any new evidence-based knowledge.

Instead, they place this impossible burden of being absolutely moral in all possible situations on their imaginary sky papa—you papa, make all the rules, this way when we make mistakes because of our lack of mental and emotional flexibility coupled with our insistence of not having to learn from our mistakes the hard way, that is, from trial and error, or from incorporating new knowledge, we can stay stuck in our ethical rut, nice and comfy in our blinkered attempts to keep our ethical focus trite and remain frozen in time like pampered, spoiled children that never need to grow up because after all we are absolutely right since we follow this non-evidential god concept that we have just whipped up out of thin air so why should we ever change our absolutely perfect and perfectly absolute views?

Posted: November 12th 2009

See all questions answered by logicel

I hope to explain why the question is moot.

Human rights are agreements about how we should treat each other.

If we run into a person who doesn’t already believe that we should treat each other well, then this person either feels no empathy towards his fellows, or doesn’t care about reasoning consistently. Either way, I don’t think we’ll be able to change their mind.

Most of the time though, the people we communicate with are motivated by empathy, and do care about reasoning consistently (our attempts to persuade each other about moral issues depend on this foundation). This is already enough to establish the vague agreement 'we should treat others well’.

Next, we continue to use reason and empathy in discussion to try to figure out what exactly it means to treat others well, and to map the boundaries of this group. Dawkins has called our changing attitudes towards these questions the shifting moral zeitgeist.

Posted: November 12th 2009

See all questions answered by bitbutter