Comment on Why would someone openly say that they oppose human rights?
GreyShuck@feddit.uk 6 months ago
In addition to the reasons suggested in several of the comments here so far, the philosopher Giorgio Agamben is extremely critical of the concept of human rights since they are a legal and political construct, and the same legal and political systems are used to create ‘exceptional’ circumstances in which the rights are deemed not to apply to certain groups. Relying on these rights is flawed, in his view, since they will be suspended when most needed. The Philosopize This Podcast did an episode on this just recently.
Jikiya@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I feel I might have misunderstood something here, as it seems like this argument is ‘Anal sex can’t be pleasurable, because that’s where poop comes from and poop is bad’. Am I understanding his argument correctly?
GreyShuck@feddit.uk 6 months ago
I have only heard of him through the podcast. I’d suggest listening to that. It’s a great series. Or, of course, his actual books are listed on the wiki page.
However, I think that he is saying that we shouldn’t be relying on something that can be and clearly IS being removed or ignored when inconvenient. Maybe, instead, we should be looking at respecting human life just for itself, without cluttering things up with legal language that doesn’t actually add anything.
Personally, I can see where he is coming from, and seldom think or speak in terms of rights myself for much the same reasons. But, either way, however much ignored or misused it is, I don’t think that we can realistically expect anyone who is likely to create exceptions to human rights to have any innate respect for people otherwise.
Until someone comes up with something better, human rights are about the best way of framing the ideas that we have.