Humans do not have rights by their nature but only as a matter of law as interpreted by prosperous practitioners of 'human rights law' who have both created and colonised the moral high ground to the great moral (and going by last night in Tottenham, the great economic) impoverishment of our society.
Humans, being moral agents, accept and require their fellow humans to accept responsibilities which, when properly discharged, confer fundamental protections on the persons, property and liberties of other humans. Ignorant, amoral and seditious persons choose or have been taught to describe these conferred protections as 'human rights' . This is dangerous, anti-human nonsense.
Groups of humans - societies - develop laws by which to encourage and if necessary compel each other, especially those least so inclined, to accept and discharge their responsibilities to protect others from harm. Legislators couch these laws not in terms of Thou Shalt but of Thou Shalt Not which although not philosophically ideal is perhaps pragmatically unavoidable if Man is to be everywhere free except where the law constrains him. (Better that everything be allowed except where it is forbidden, rather than the converse.)
Unfortunately, the practical application of necessarily prohibitive laws is exclusively reserved to a class of people (see the first paragraph, above) who have decided among themselves to interpret Citizen A Must Not as Citizen B Is Entitled.
To enact a law called a Human Rights Act, codifying as your enforceable 'rights' the effects of my proper discharge of my moral and social responsibilities is to remove the necessity for me to consciously and actively accept those responsibilities. It relocates the onus to you - or to the state on your behalf. You are now the active agent, not me. To avert threat to your person, property and liberty, you must first proclaim your victim-hood.
This is to stand natural justice on its head, absolving me of any duty to you except when compelled by state violence or the threat of it. I am no longer obliged to think about justice because others (the victim/claimant, the state, the lawyer...) will do it instead of me, on your behalf as victim.
Thus has an essentially Marxist denial of the moral nature and responsibility of the individual human person removed all culpability from me, rendering me irresponsible and encouraging me to wash my hands of you. The State is responsible for you and does not expect me to be responsible for you.
In place of personal moral, social and civic responsibility for each other, we have a brave new system of 'human rights'. As I wash my hands of your enforced victim-hood there is an outbreak of ostentatious hand-wringing by the authorities, newspapers, lawyers and self-righteous and ignorant ghouls everywhere. Ritual wailing about your human rights echoes fills the air.
Can the Big Society, predicated as it is on personal moral, social and civic responsibility, hope to gain any ground among people thus brainwashed into claiming their 'human rights' without considering their 'human responsibilities'? Good luck with that, Dave.
And so, in a western capital city, in a society more wealthy and feather-bedded than our forefathers could have dreamt possible, we have arson, violence and riots (allegedly) protesting at 'offences' against the 'human rights' of an underclass whose members are utterly unaware of their responsibilities as moral human agents but every single one of whom is thoroughly schooled in the language of human rights.
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Something along these lines will be submitted to the Orphans of Liberty blog, prompted by a post there on the proposed re-jigging of Britain's Human Rights Act which the writer correctly describes as pointless because whatever follows will be based on the same fallacious document, the Convention on Human Rights.
Thank you.
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