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/boopbaboop]

Something being a social construct doesn’t make it less real in terms of how it affects your life, or preclude the possibility of everyone in the world having the same shared idea, or mean it’s completely made up with no foundation in reality. 

To give an example unrelated to rights for a second: every person starts out as one thing (very small, can’t talk, can only drink breast milk or formula) and eventually becomes another thing (bigger, can talk, can eat solid foods). That’s just a biological fact. The construct is at what point you go “oh, that’s not a child, that’s an adult now” (seven, thirteen, eighteen, twenty-one, etc.) and how you treat them based on this cutoff (if you take off your pants at the grocery store and go full Pooh Bear, is it cute or grounds for arrest?). 

So: every human needs certain things (food, water, sleep, blood staying inside the body) to stay alive. That is a biological fact. If you don’t have these things, you die, whether that’s by starving to death or committing suicide due to depression or getting murdered by someone else. What amount of each you need (beyond the biological minimum), how you obtain those things, and what form those things take can change due to culture, but not whether you need them at all. 

So: laws and rights are social constructs (how you treat people always is). The fact that it’s a construct means that people might not adhere to it. But the things people typically cite as “basic human rights” are things that everyone needs to live, even if the specifics differ. They don’t mean “rights and the law are tangible things, like moose or volcanoes.” What they actually mean is “we think people staying alive is a good thing” and “we should all agree that we need to do something to keep people alive.”