Intro to Human Rights and Philosophy

Question 1

What is a right? Examples?
What is the difference between that and a privilage?

Answer 1

• A right is a (socially recognised) entitlement to do something
• It typically involves that others have a duty NOT to prevent you from doing that something
• E.g.: the right to free speech, the right to receive an education, the right to drive if you have a license, the right to apply for a job, etc
• ChatGPT: A privilege is a special benefit or advantage granted and can be revoked.

Question 2

What does it mean for a right to be ‘socially recognised’?
What is a legal right?

Answer 2

What does it mean for a right to be ‘socially recognised’?
- ChatGPT: A right is socially recognized when it is widely accepted and upheld by society as essential for fairness, equality, and justice.

Legal rights: (Most rights) - you have them because they are codified in your country’s constitution / legal system, and the State enforces them

Question 3

What is a positive right, examples?

Answer 3

Positive Rights - rights that provide something that people need to secure their well being, such as a right to an education, the right to food, the right to medical care, the right to housing, or the right to a job.

Question 4

What are human rights?
What is the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights?

What are the challenges with these?

Answer 4

Human Rights - rights inherent to all human beings, regardless of race, sex, nationality, ethnicity, language, religion, or any other status.

• objective: To set ‘a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations’
• Examples: right to life, liberty and security of person

Challenges:
- These are MORAL rights, not positive rights (unless specific States have decided to include them in their Constitution / legal system). They rely on the philosophical idea of the MORAL equality of ALL people

Question 5

What is Mill’s No Harm Principle?

Answer 5

• central to the political philosophy of liberalism, which values individual rights and personal liberty.
• “the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.” - Mill
• Definition: the principle that only those actions that create harm should be prevented
• “You’re right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins”