[D66] The Myth of Human Rights

[René Oudeweg]

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/bob-black-the-myth-of-human-rights


Title: The Myth of Human Rights
Author: Bob Black
Topics: human rights, rights
Date: 2021
Source: Submitted by the author.



 There are fashions in clothes and music. And there are fashions in
politics. One current fashion in politics, all over the world, is human
rights: “Human rights is the idea of our time.”[2] Everybody likes human
rights. Not everybody respects them. I will make the claim that human
rights are never respected, as human rights. Because human rights have
no objective reality, there is nothing to respect. Some humans are
worthy of respect, but not their imaginary rights.

Today, it’s scandalous to disbelieve in human rights. A prominent social
philosopher named Joel Feinberg is appalled that there are, as he says,
“even extreme misanthropes who deny that anyone in fact has rights.”[3]
These extreme misanthropes would include Plato, Aristotle, Confucius,
Jesus, Mohammed, Thomas Aquinas, Johann Gottlieb von Herder, Edmund
Burke, William Godwin, Jeremy Bentham, Peter Kropotkin and Friedrich
Nietzsche. Until about 500 years ago, everyone must have been an extreme
misanthrope, which is certainly not how Jesus Christ and Prince
Kropotkin, among others, are regarded. Nonetheless, Professor Feinberg’s
writings have been hailed as “far-reaching and subtle”: they “achieve an
unparalleled combination of rigor, sensitivity, and clarity.”[4] Imagine
what the rest of the philosophers must be like.

[...]