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Europe’s Entry/Exit System (EES) will become fully operational from April 10, 2026, replacing passport stamps with digital records and biometric checks.
EU countries are now collecting the fingerprints of all foreign travelers. They are also taking photographs of travelers' faces. The result so far is that 2 hour lines are common for entry into the EU.
I'm generally opposed to this. For one, I'm libertarian in that I oppose most international borders. The reason is that it violates human rights for very little justified purpose. There are ways to justify borders, but no country or entity on Earth is in the position to do that at the moment. The EU does not have a moral right to do this when it won't stop 99% of the harmful immigration into the EU, which is all legal.
This measure is offensive to people with legitimate rights to travel, while not significantly affecting those coming in immorally but legally, for the maybe-upside of catching a few more street criminals trying to come in on a fake passport. Is the point of this that cocaine prices should go up even more in the EU? Why? What is the point? Who is vulnerable to cocaine addiction? Why does money need to be spent on protecting them from their own decisions?
I'm predicting this will spread, too. If the EU is collecting fingerprints of all of country X's citizens that go to it, then country X will want to collect fingerprints for all EU citizens that come into it. Otherwise the EU has an advantaged biometrics database. As a proponent of free travel, every little tin-pot government collecting vast biometrics sounds like it will chill the ease and personal security of traveling. How long until it's DNA?
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.
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:
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.
Original natural law theory is Catholic doctrine stemming from objective morality and God, it was also more about natural law and less about natural rights, especially in the modern sense that right is personal and individual property. Additionally, modern rights do not have much with duties and obligations. Or to be more precise rights are entitlements absent duty or obligation. You are entitled to your right, you do not have any obligation toward that right.
If that is so, then some other community or even the same community but in different time can aspire to different set of rights which they will declare as universal. Just remember COVID when suddenly all those "universal human rights" stopped working for a prolonged time. Quite a fickle things these rights, they can change their way of existence quite a lot, can they not?
This is sophism. You absolutely understand what he wanted to say. He said that human rights exist as a fiction created by state as opposed to their existence as that of the sun or the moon. It is perfectly fine distinction to make even for materialists. Even materialists understand that let's say Francis Underwood exists as a fictional character and POTUS in famous Netflix TV show as opposed to let's say Donald Trump existing as a real person and POTUS. In similar fashion rights exist as a fiction enforced by power of government, that is all that the OP said and it is perfectly in line with materialism. Without government they still exist as a fiction, but nobody cares in the same way nobody cares for my version of fictional president of USA named Chad Norris or my version of universal human rights, that in my fictional world prevented government spying on email correspondence or property theft over prolonged period named as property tax. I hope now it is clear.
Don't most rights imply a corresponding duty? Admittedly, most of the duties fall on the state, for example the right to free speech implies that neither the state nor its agents should suppress your speech, unless it is in a handful of exceptional categories like fraud, copyright, libel/slander, fighting words, and specific threats of violence.
However, I think that you can make the case that the West historically viewed rights as a bit broader than that. For example, free speech connects with the Greek virtue of parhessia (frankness of speech), and thus in its widest conception free speech implies an obligation to speak truth to power even if you're in a regime where that will get you killed. (And in fact, many Stouc philosophers, like Helvidius Priscus, did just that, criticizing the emperor and accepting their death sentences with poise and equanimity.)
Rights might be legal fictions in some sense, but so is money, or the concept of the United States, or the position of President of the United States. You could grind the atoms of the universe down and you would find no money, no debt, no contracts, because this is a category error. Those things exist as collective beliefs inside people's minds, as data patterns in their brains.
No. This idea is generally a way for tyrants to vitiate rights, with the formula "You have the right to X, you have the duty to only employ X in the way I tell you to"
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