Movieblob

[Keith Chegwin]

You've gone full fedora

[drisko]

No shit, I'm wondering if Blob got a hold of Tictac's account.

If not, then your argument ignores that the value of life is an inherited trait that we learned. By entitling every living being to the right to life, we've given ourselves the ability to go into tomorrow without the fear that we might get killed, allowing us to focus on other things that have lead to our advanced society. There would be no jobs, no technology, no structure, if everyone thought of everyone else as worthless because the human brain requires some encouragement, some entertainment, in order to keep going, just as it needs food and water to keep the body going. If I go into work tomorrow and yell at one guy while telling another guy he's doing a good job, guess who I'm going to get better work out of.

The fact that this is so fucking obvious I cannot believe I have to actually explain it to you makes me wonder if you were just trolling. Which I could respect.

[Poonoo]

You've gone full fedora

He does that sometimes. Like when I get shitty with Marxist leaning lefties.

[Kugelfisch]

His point isn't that a society could work without what is usually called "basic human decency". It's that it's silly to pretend as if you're guaranteed a certain treatment by nature.

[Keith Chegwin]

So, in other words, rights are a social construct
I return to my point

[Kugelfisch]

So, in other words, rights are a social construct
I return to my point

That's exactly what they are, yes. One of the few things where that isn't just a meme.

[rabidtictac]

His point isn't that a society could work without what is usually called "basic human decency". It's that it's silly to pretend as if you're guaranteed a certain treatment by nature.

Yes. I was just expanding on this delusional belief about human rights having some intrinsic property. We value human lives because we are human and alive. It's a reptile brain response. It's like valuing food because you consume food. But food isn't a right of human beings, any more than anything else is. Needing, desiring or valuing something isn't the same as being entitled to it.

We make allowances for myriad useful fictions/constructs because they make society work better. I wasn't disputing that.

[Keith Chegwin]

I was more latching on to your characterisation of human rights as 'anti-Darwinian'. Darwin was against slavery. He didn't believe there were any innate differences between people of different races, he didn't agree with the ill-treatment of native peoples. He didn't step off the Beagle as euphoric as your average redditor, human rights were very much in keeping with his principles.

[rabidtictac]

I wasn't ascribing moral rightness or wrongness to whether or not something goes against the survival of the most well-adapted. (Also I was shitting on shitlibs for believing in the existence of a thing that isn't indicated by hard science.) What I was saying there was that it goes directly against our own evolutionary history to ascribe rights to any beings. Evolution is driven by conflict and the struggle to survive. Survival which necessitates domination, subjugation and destruction of other life forms.

Of course, evolution basically no longer applies to life on this planet, as humans are the driving forces behind what animals survive and which don't on Earth. So we can construct whatever fictions we please and pretend as though they are real. If everyone pretends, I suppose there's no meaningful difference between if it's real or not.

To summarize, morally, most people would say they AGREE with the idea of human rights. They like it. They support the construct. But to the question of whether or not they exist, I would say no. The difference is that existence isn't defined by mutual agreement. We all agree (on DHI, in the USA, whatever) on a right to speech. But the moment that agreement is broken and is no longer mutual, the right to speak disappears. It has happened all over the place in the world. The same is true for rights to freedom, right to a job, right to clean air, whatever else. As soon as the agreement is in dispute, it must either be resolved or the right disappears. So the right can't exist as anything other than a cultural construct.

The wind exists whether or not we agree it does. Humidity exists whether or not we agree it does. Human rights are legal rights, codified in law because they do not exist anywhere outside of the human courts which either enforce or do not recognize them.

I wasn't trying to be a fedora, just a philosophizing fuck.

A lot of the EU and USA's problems on foreign policy (in my opinion) come down to trying to enforce a single, universal idea of human rights across the world, but thinking they can somehow do that without placing all nations under a single legal framework.

[Kugelfisch]

Libshits have no problem going against the science they claim to love so much. Especially biology is basically disregarded today by them, even harder than right wing ultra christfags ever did.