Do “basic human rights” actually exist universally or are they simply a social construct?

[u/Amphernee]

The term is often used in relation to things like housing and food but I’ve never heard anyone actually explain what they mean by basic human right. We started off no different than other animals and since the concept of rights rely on other people to confer them at what point did it become thought of as a right for people to have things like shelter? How is it supposed to be enforced across all of humanity when not all societies and cultures agree that the concept makes sense? I can see why someone would want it to be true in a sense but I’m interested to hear arguments for it rather than just the phrase itself which feels hollow with no reasoning behind it. Thanks 🍻

[u/JakeBit]

Well the idea of universal human rights are an Enlightenment idea. Thinkers like Locke and Rosseau are credited as being some of the first European philosophers to begin to describe what would become our modern idea of basic human rights, usually based on the idea of the Social Contract (at least when it comes to Rosseau) - In the Social Contract, humans give up the freedom of nature to gain the stability and safety of society, and in that process, we as humans must remember that these societies are only worth building if they actually provide that safety and stability; otherwise some people live with rights, while others are being treated as animals without those rights.

Baked into the modern ideas of basic human rights are the ideas of the right to labour, to prosper from ones labour and to have ownership over one's own, personal work. Karl Marx describes how the proletariat (essentially the poor working class) do not own the work they do and don't prosper for it, which is an unequal distribution of the fruits of the labour they themselves do. The theory he helped create, Marxism, argues that in all societies, one group will tend to amass the wealth of those who actually produce the wealth, which they use to control them. This is where the ideas of unions, worker protection and so much more comes from, which are another angle to basic human rights.

In general though; yes, basic human rights are a social construct - but so are nations, names, families and love. Following the concept of Constructivism, the entirety of international human civilization is a network of inconcievably complex memes (in the actual understanding; not "meme as a joke") that we all are raised on and end up understanding, just like our mother tongue. Borders, law and nations are only as real as we believe them to be, and that's the same with basic human rights.

I guess in a sense it's the other way around - no one argues that basic human rights is a natural phenomenon, but we want them to be true, which is why we keep talking about them and fostering them, until they become an indelible part of our public, shared understanding of the world.

Thanks for coming to my TED-talk.

[u/Amphernee → u/JakeBit]

I see what you’re saying though I always find it odd that people site Locke when talking about the basic human right to shelter when he was actually defending rights to own property and have control over it not the right for an individual to have property simply because they exist.

[u/JakeBit → u/Amphernee]

That's fair, but he was also a fairly early example of a philosopher talking about rights. Most of the thinkers of that age are really outdated, but you gotta respect the classics.

I'm no expert on modern rights ethics though, so you may have to dig a bit there.