On Human Rights

[shawgreen]

What is it the right wing politicians of our country dont understand about the concept of human rights.

I hear time and time again, if it wasnt for those pesky human rights we could do the right thing by the country as a whole and properly protect the law abding majority.

Hello ? The whole point to human rights legislation is to define a set of basic

Comments

[messyfragments]

Surely the concept of human rights is impossible to apply in reality, which is why there are so many exceptions to them. So do we really have any Human rights?

There's a few very interesting debates going on in the bioethics forum at present about the reality of implementing some of the concepts (in the ethics, morals, human rights type debate) we think are for the 'good'. Also, whether some of these concepts are really 'good'.

http://www.21school.ox.ac.uk/ is looking at a lot of this in their bioethics and future of humanity projects.

Yes and No

[shawgreen]

I do see what your saying and I guess in a fundamnetal philsophical sense thats right we dont have any absolute human rights.

The issue is one of tradeoffs as I said, we can conceive of a right to life for example or liberty but we have to on occasion balance these against the rights of other human beings.

What these guys are calling rights I guess in reality are guiding legal principles to which other legal principles are subservient.