I recently had a brief conversation with the mother of a young lady I tutor in mathematics, she has worked for a couple of decades in special needs learning and she is currently fighting to have schools recognise that it is a human right for special needs kids to be able to attend mainstream schools. She was expressing her frustration after having a meeting that morning with Principals from around the State. You can imagine my tongue was a little sore by the end of that conversation. This piece is a bit of catharsis but it does have a purpose, in fact, this particular topic is a great example of a number of phenomena,

Getting back on track, in terms of the general progressive perspective, what we might call a kind of sloppy Rawlsian perspective, human rights are conceived of as at best a mechanism to limit tyranny or suffering from behind a veil of ignorance, at worst they are seen as moral pretension, a pretty facade to disguise a fundamentally unjust system.

Whenever progressives discuss rights they are in fact discussing a mutable and alienable concept, if they are being genuine when they use the word or phrase 'human rights', in other words, my American Conservative friends -- they do not hold these truths to be self-evident -- does this make them treasonous? Never forget, they started the boogie woogie long ago. So, round up the lads, the boogaloos half way done and no one's even fired a gun!

Enough with all that fun, so what does this all mean, well let me give you a concrete example. when a progressive says they believe in something like the human right to freedom of movement what they are really saying is that they believe in present circumstances it is favourable from behind a veil of ignorance to prevent limitations on freedom of movement, however, if the circumstances change, for example, as they did during the coronavirus pandemic then freedom of movement harms the most vulnerable in society, i.e. the immunocompromised, therefore not only do you not have a right to freedom of movement you have an obligation to highly restricted movement.

The aforementioned example demonstrates how the progressive conception of a right is relative, it is alienable given a change in circumstance at the level of the system as a whole, e.g. pandemic when this change in circumstance means the maintenance of said right has a negative impact on those now seen as closest to the Rawlsian floor. It tends to be the case that fairly regularly a progressive, will, with all apparent sincerity, advocate for a human right to freedom of expression but really mean something that is not at all universal.

This generally occurs due to how they have framed the concern. To take the example of freedom of expression further, it is non-universal, being valid when enabling a socially disadvantaged person to express their identity without fear of repercussion but not applicable to a socially advantaged person expressing a caricature that demeans or dehumanises the marginalised, and in the more extreme case, which is frequent today, to prohibit the use of any cultural aspect of the marginalised group from being used at all by the dominant group, or discussed in anything other than a wholly positive light.

This is highly distressing to normie conservatives and to rights-based libertarians, (aka shit for brains libertarians). In a follow-up piece, I will discuss how Austrian-inspired libertarians view this, i.e. rights as property rights. The way that “human rights” are viewed by more sophisticated modern liberals and progressives is as utilitarian heuristics, not as things that are true in themselves but as things that either help maximise utility or create the greatest floor of utility from behind a veil of ignorance.

Below is an attempt at a rough description of this Rawlsian notion using sets,

So relating this back, human rights are seen as helping us approach our desired S.

To obtain our desired S, we can see from our previous examples, that progressives require a dynamic approach to rights. In response to the original progressive movement’s lack of judicial success in achieving their goals, (because their goals were not constitutional), the notion of a living constitution developed,

Society is a living organism and must obey the laws of life, not of mechanics; it must develop. All that progressives ask or desire is permission - in an era when "development," "evolution," is the scientific word - to interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle; all they ask is recognition of the fact that a nation is a living thing and not a machine.

Woodrow Wilson, 1912 Speech.

This notion of a living constitution helps attain the required flexibility given the goals of progressives. The real purpose of this approach is to make the implementation of the Rawlsian conception achievable, and the means of the Rawlsian is social engineering. Wilson’s babbling about Darwinian principles is outdated imbecility that has been replaced with more modern forms of justification, of similar quality but superior in political correctness.

Of course, conservatives subscribe to originalism, which is the opposing ideology, that the constitution should be interpreted and enforced as originally intended. Changes should in this view be pursued by amendments as outlined in the, you guessed it, constitution. This is why you often hear conservatives say that this or that is unconstitutional. Doubtless, while I am more sympathetic to it, the reality is that the originalist view is delusional, it just is not the reality of the situation and never will be. Even the Catholic Church cannot pull it off successfully, though they did a remarkable job for a very long time as a constitutional monarchy, however, originalism in democracy is a total crapshoot.

For conservative originalists, human rights are inalienable, they then combine this with the idea of just acquisition and exchange, proposed by the other philosopher of the 20th-century political ethics duopoly, the anti-Rawls, Robert Nozick, to produce their theory of a just society. So, from the conservative and rights-based libertarian perspective, human rights really exist and are the foundation axioms of civil society. The Nozick-Rawls distinction is commonly discussed as an issue of negative and positive legal rights.

Less well-educated liberals and conservatives generally believe in both things simultaneously, to some extent, when I say less well-educated this includes the vast majority of College graduates, we may as well say those who do not examine their own thoughts about the world. It is more common for liberals to believe in both simultaneously because part of the propaganda they were exposed to is a hangover from the past that teaches them to respect the constitution but then they attend higher education and receive reverse brainwashing so that if you were to ask them if they are for the constitution they would likely say that they were and then they would proceed to espouse opinions that are aligned with the examples of rights hypocrisy we discussed previously. This partially subconscious confusion about their own views makes your average conservative feel like they are being gaslit and are in an all-pervasive world of Orwellian doublespeak, I believe the increase in this phenomenon is one of the leading causes of right-leaning schizopolitical analysis.

My own view of these things, if I have one with regards to human rights is more of the Natural Rights variety, in the full Catholic Virtue Ethics conception of things, of course, I have the practical problem of my atheism, however.

Needless to say, what I have presented here is a greatly simplified view of things and this issue is substantially more complicated, there are other things to discuss with respect to the progressive and conservative views, like the conception of the social contract, the general will, etc, which no doubt we will cover in future pieces.

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