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I've been thinking a while on my somewhat liberal leanings and I've discovered something rather curious. Intellectually, the foundation of my beliefs is incompatable with the standard modern liberalism despite the fact that both I and the average more-pinko-hippie-than-me person down the street tend to support similar things most of the time. It came to me, really, when it comes to my disagreements with organizations such as Amnesty International and, more personally, the people who constantly accost me about it on campus with the phrase "Do you have a moment for human rights?"
If they do it again I'll pause, look at them jovially, and say with a polite smile "I'm afraid not, because I don't believe in them." That should get quite the reaction.
Pull up a copy of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and read through its articles. It brings up the usual rights, and starts out with the right to life, liberty, and the security of person. Then it goes through the right to fair recompense for work, the right to be recognized as a person under law, and so forth; listing along with the entitlements that the philosophical concept of "rights" logically bring. All this is well and good, but think about it for the moment. Everyone has the right to life, liberty, and security of person. This is rather broad, and too broad, in my opinion: child molesters are in the set of "everyone," serial killers are in the subset of "everyone," genocidal dictators are in the subset of "everyone." This causes a problem because it pretty much flat-out says that a society can take no aggressive action to abrogate the freedoms of anyone who threatens it with violence. A society (far less than a state) cannot restrain someone from killing, thus infringing on their right to liberty, nor kill someone in self defense, thus infringing on their right to life and security of person. This is, at best, illogical and if taken at face value leads to a culture too soft to protect itself.
Take, for example, execution. I'm not going to gloss over things by using the milkwater euphemism "capital punishment." The average liberal believes strongly in the right to life (save for unborn children, but that's a different matter I don't want to get into except as an aside right now) and so points out that execution has a very high measure of physical revenge calculated into its use. They say, instead, that the penal system exists for the rehabilitation of individuals and that you can't rehabilitate a dead man; additionally, what if the person is innocent? This is reasonable and so we will take it as a point that a proper incarceration system should work in tandem with enlightened methods of bringing criminals back into society as productive members. We will ignore the fact that any prison by its very definition infringes on these peoples' theoretical right to liberty.
Now take the incorrigible who show no sign or interest in being rehabilitated; the violently mentally ill who cannot be treated and returned to the fold of society; and those so mentally retarded that they do not understand the moral capability of their actions. The latter two are held as sacred calves by those who oppose execution in all forms; how can one punish in vengeance people who can not be responsible for their actions? I look at it a different way: how can one rehabilitate people who can not be responsible for their actions? They are being incarcerated as a protection to the rest of society because they cannot be released. The rest of the society pays for their protection while they offer nothing in return for the maintenance of the society other than staying out of it. Given that quite a few philosophers in positions to know have believed that the right to freedom is far more precious than the right to life, the concept of incarcerating people for life with no opportunity for parole becomes morally negligible. It is simply a grim, dirty fact supported perhaps on the hope that these people will magically become better, which is exceedingly unlikely.
I won't say that the people who refuse the possibility of execution in favor of life imprisonment without parole are wrong; I will say that it is inefficient and at odds with the concept that a penal system should rehabilitate instead of simply separate. If it becomes acceptable to abrogate rights for the betterment of the person in the long run, then how can we justify abrogating their right to freedom indefinitely except as a protection of their right to life, which has already been argued to be worth less than freedom by those better suited to do so than me?
This shows how rights ethics are insufficient to run a society for the same reason that most strict rules-based ethical systems are insufficient: they cannot take into account the greater picture of reality. For the survival of the greater group sometimes rights must go by the wayside for selected individuals. Rights ethics also builds up the concept of entitlement, the concept that people get things simply because they are without any effort expended to, if not earn them, deserve them. As nature has shown time and again, all stable systems require some sort of equivalent exchange to maintain a safe equilibrium. There is no thing as a free lunch, and, intellectually, there is no such thing as a right to which people are simply entitled to with no effort on their own.
Yes, I think the concept of the inalienable human right is flawed on its most basic level. The concept is because a person is human, the person is entitled to life, liberty, and security by their nature as a human. Let us think about this: "what right to life has a man drowning in the sea?" as Heinlein put it. Nature is a harsh mistress who cuts humanity no more slack than any other animal on this globe. The rabbit hunted by the fox has no natural right to life; the man hunted by the wolves has no natural right to life. A beached whale has no natural right to liberty; a man trapped in a sinkhole or a well has no natural right to liberty. Nothing at all in the entire world, not even the ecology that makes up the world itself, has the natural right to security. No, rights are human constructs like all ethical systems used to justify the idea of giving them and generally not withholding them from people. They are artificial, not natural, and to claim them to be natural is absurd at best and propaganda at worst.
I do believe in social justice, egalitarianism, freedom, free will, social equality, and the like. I do not, however, imagine that the human spirit has any inalienable right towards these, as Nature can and does abrogate them at whim. I believe that they are at their core good things that people should have on the basis that humans, being free moral agents, are most full of potential when allowed and capable of acting with all the autonomy they can with the realization that all other humans are also free moral agents equal in their ability for thinking abstractly and acting independently as all known sophonts do. Because they are "only" good things people should have, there is no intellectual quandry in restricting them at enlightened need--someone who is dangerous to other people's 'right' to life should have his own 'right' to liberty abrogated until such a time that he can re-enter society, properly reeducated to become a constructive element. If that is untenable and the situation is unusually dire, then nulling that person's 'right' to life becomes an option to free up resources to rehabilitate others far more likely of success.
Rights serve an important role as Platonic Ideals that people should aspire to; a perfect person should have and respect all Rights and a perfect state should never have to abrogate Rights. However, reality is, by far, not perfect and will never achieve this state except by means probably considered ethically questionable by most. A society should keep in mind the concept of Rights and try its best to allow people these Rights as much as possible, but with the understanding that the security of the society and the greater good of everyone's Rights comes first over the errant individual. However, the Rights of the greater society--the People--are worth more than the rights of the State when the end goals of the State and the People are in conflict. That the People's Republic of China oppresses spiritual movements because they constitute a mild threat to the Communist doctrine of atheistic control is wrong; the State may not abrogate the 'Right' of religious freedom simply to maintain a tighter hold on its People. That the occasional State executes a murderer who shows no chance of rehabilitation except as a show for the media is not right nor wrong, but a necessity of reality; the State is authorized to abrogate the Right of life of an individual to protect the Right of life of the People. Defensive warfare falls into the same category.
So, in the end, when I tell the good representative from Amnesty International that I do not believe in human rights, I hope that they at least ask for explanation before passing judgment.
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