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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   12037 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 6, 2026

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The reason is that it violates human rights for very little justified purpose.

I never failed to understand how libertarians could think like that. Human rights are fiction created by the state and existing only trough the state.

And it is easy to prove - take any human, do the thoroughest possible vivisection on them and you won't be able to find a single right.

Human rights are fiction created by the state and existing only trough the state.

This is very much not consensus.

There are, I think, broadly two schools of thought on human rights.

The first is what I'll call rights realism, and it's the older, more traditional one. Rooted in natural law, it is objectively the case that different beings carry with them different moral duties and obligations. Understanding what something is implies certain normative principles about what can or must be done concerning that thing. In this specific case, humans, simply by virtue of being human, possess certain moral rights and imply certain duties. This is the theory implied by documents like the US declaration of independence ("...the laws of nature and of nature's God..."), and the Abrahamic religions tend to be quite keen on this. 'Human rights' are thus an attempt to recognise and codify these rights and duties. Any given legal regime is almost certainly flawed, even more so in the implementation, but is nonetheless commendable to recognise and try to protect the natural rights of every human being.

The second is what I'll call the constructivist view, and it says that, though rights don't necessarily exist in nature in a direct way, rights language represents a communal decision. It an aspiration - the universal declaration of human rights, say, is a declaration that we as a community have decided that human beings must be treated in this way. Human rights in this sense are a social fact, but no less important or binding for that. Note that the constructivists do not require the state. Social realities can exist outside of and prior to the state.

I note that your rebuttal fails to move both of these schools:

And it is easy to prove - take any human, do the thoroughest possible vivisection on them and you won't be able to find a single right.

This is like Death's 'atom of justice' speech, and it's wrong for the same reason. Neither school is saying that human rights are physical things. The realists believe that moral rights and duties exist objectively despite being non-physical. They are not materialists. And the rights constructivists fully understand that they're talking about a social reality.

Even a determined materialist isn't going to be moved by your argument, or by Death's. Materialists do not believe that nothing that isn't a physical object exists. Things can be properties of states of affairs. Death is wrong because justice or mercy are attributes of states of affairs, not elementary particles, and no less real for that. Some configurations of molecules are just and other configurations are not, the same way that some configurations correspond to living things and some configurations do not, and Death's entire existence is premised on that distinction. Likewise some arrangements of human beings are humans-rights-respecting, and some are humans-rights-violating. It is coherent to say that a torturer vivisecting someone to look for the 'rights' organ is violating a human right, even though he will never find such an organ.

I never failed to understand how libertarians could think like that. Human rights are fiction created by the state and existing only trough the state.

I'm not a libertarian, but I am sympathetic to their position. I'm not sure I would frame the issue in terms of human rights, but I remember my youth when you could live your life without constantly showing your ID to people. I crossed between the US and Canada many times without being asked for a passport or even a driver license. I flew many times without presenting any kind of ID, let alone fingerprints.

I am not thrilled about the fact that we've drifted into a police/surveillance state type of situation. I do appreciate the lower crime rates, but I think that almost the same thing could have been accomplished if the West had stayed 90+% people of European descent.

The classic American viewpoint is that rights are given by God. Such as this famous line.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--

That free will allows for bad humans to trample on god's gifts doesn't make them any less divinely bestowed to the classic American viewpoint.

the state.

"The state" is not real, outside of being what we call the most powerful and recognized dominant organization of a given area or people. It is composed of people and in the classic view it is the people's own responsibility to fight for and protect their own natural rights, granted by God, from others who mean to harm them. Hence the American revolution, usurping an abusive state for one of their own.

States are fictions created by individuals and exist only through individuals. Go to any courthouse, police station, parliament building, do the thoroughest possible search, and you won't be able to find a single state. Just a bunch of individuals! Rights are a Schelling point that let individuals who don't call themselves members of the state regulate the behaviors of those who do. Without these Schelling points, the state is allowed to do anything whatsoever. That's obviously bad.

It may be bad, but states have always been allowed to do whatever they please.

And it is easy to prove - take any human, do the thoroughest possible vivisection on them and you won't be able to find a single right.

This applies to a ton of things though. Take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder and sieve it through the finest sieve and then show me one atom of justice, mercy, fairness, god, faith, happiness, race, love, LLCs, etc. The list goes on. Not everything is a physically existing element.

A strictly materialist viewpoint of reality is likely insufferably bleak to the point that no one alive would want to live it.

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