Consider John Locke. He didn't create the idea of "human rights" any more than any one individual can be solely credited with any accomplishment in history, but I think it's fair to say he contributed a lot to the idea and is suitably emblematic of it. Locke trained as a physician, not as a philosopher. He worked largely as a physician and a bureaucrat. If he was a philosopher, he was an empiricist who wrote more about politics and economics than about metaphysics (to which he was somewhat indisposed). And, he was largely ignored until his writings became useful to American revolutionaries who arguably were again occupied more by the grubby business of politics than by the airy theories of metaphysics. Based on this one example, I would argue that Locke was as much if not more-so a political theorist than he was any kind of metaphysical philosopher and that therefore the claim that human rights is a metaphysical notion rather than a political idea, is weakened.
> Human rights. It's a metaphysical spook with no grounding in the natural world
human rights has no grounding anywhere but the natural world
And its grounding is quite solid. It's been talked about for many millennia. And for example, saying that slaves or serfs have no rights is itself an acknowledgement of human rights, an indication that it makes sense to consider that humans might be worthy of rights. There isn't really any definition of the word "rights" except that it starts with human rights.
dventimi|2 years ago
fsckboy|2 years ago
human rights has no grounding anywhere but the natural world
And its grounding is quite solid. It's been talked about for many millennia. And for example, saying that slaves or serfs have no rights is itself an acknowledgement of human rights, an indication that it makes sense to consider that humans might be worthy of rights. There isn't really any definition of the word "rights" except that it starts with human rights.