[leephillips]

Thank you for that rundown; I found it useful, because I’m also hazy about this terminology.

I hesitate to take this into what might be an irrelevant and contentious side road, but I just want to remark that the ACLU is not considered an organization that defends “everybody’s“ rights by everybody. They’ve historically done a fantastic job at defending freedom of speech, press, and assembly, and also 4th amendment rights. Aside from that, it depends on the cultural background of whatever lawyers happen to have influence in the organization. I don’t think most gun owners would say the the ACLU is interested in defending them against the government’s infringement of their rights to keep and bear arms, for example. And, more recently, they’ve taken stances that some people consider misogynistic, by telling women that they have no right to women-only spaces, for example. Women have increasing reason to feel that the ACLU is not defending their rights, in this sphere. So are they a good example of Liberalism? I guess it’s complicated.

[dalbasal]

These things are never clean.

In the context of 20th century liberalism, some rights are more broadly accepted than others. Freedom of speech, press, free assembly, political association, rule of law, religion, property etc... these are the core freedoms.. the liberties liberalism refers to. Gun rights are somewhat unique to America so IDK how to treat them.

Other rights... these are not necessarily "liberal" rights. Socialism, for example, always criticised liberals for leaving workers rights and economic rights out of the equation. The ones that exist in law came about later, from socialist (progressives in US terms) agitations that came from "left" of the liberals.

Women only spaces, other such rights... I'm not sure how they relate to liberalism. Feminism generally has not been a purely liberal movement. It had/has many camps and influences.

Liberalism does not mean support for every right. In fact, early liberalism opposed the "rights and privileges" of monarchs, clergy and the aristocracy. Those rights, for example, are part of the UK constitution, but liberals are against them.

[leephillips]

I think that clarifies something. Any right, even a basic human right, is in conflict with something that someone else might consider an opposing right. So Liberalism is more specific than recognition of rights of man, or something like that. It is the elevation of a particular set of rights. It is a taking of sides. Would you agree with that?

[dalbasal]

That's one way of looking at it.

I personally think political ideologies are just less complete than their self perception. Liberalism, as a political/historical phenomenon just is what it is. It recognised certain things as "rights of man." Some evolved, others got added. Mostly though, what they invented then is what liberalism is today.

Much of liberalism was related to politics of the day. Monarchism, clericalism, etc. Freedom of religion, association, speech and such were issues of the day. Feminism's boom years were still hundreds of years away. I can't really think of any (old) liberals who even talked about women's issues.

It's not necessarily a question of opposing rights. It's about what rights you recognise or don't.

In Scotland, the "right to roam" exists... which allows you to access private property like farms. In the US, "gun rights" exist.

You could theoretically have any political rights in your version of liberalism. It just happens to have happened, that liberalism converged on a certain set of rights early on and stuck with that.

[Kednicma]

No, the entire conception of rights is tied to liberalism, and itself is not the end of human moral ideology. Rights are good compromises: If we all broadly agree that humans are entitled to some right R, then R will become a social institution which we enshrine and protect, and that is good enough for society to make progress and people to get on with their lives.

For a deeper look, try this Marxist approach, "The Problem With Human Rights" [0]. As both they and I want to emphasize, the goal isn't to take away rights or to disenfranchise people, but to explore exactly what we mean when we say that people are endowed with inalienable rights and what we want governments to do about it.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhRBsJYWR8Q

[dalbasal]

the entire conception of rights is tied to liberalism

Tied to, yes. But the liberals were using a framework that already existed.

The concept of rights was already used in a constitutional way referring to the "divine and privileges" of the King, the "rights and privileges" of Clergy, the Church, Aristocracy & such.

Rights were already seen as the basis of politcal systems.

Marxism is pretty vast, so almost anything can be marxist. That said, Marx himself didn't speak about rights positively, and was critical of liberalism. His premise was that rights don't matter. Material conditions matter.

[Kednicma]

You could stand to actually watch the video I linked. To quote its opening line:

> Human rights today have the kind of status that the divine right of kings had in the Middle Ages. They are so deeply ingrained in our political thinking that imagining a society without them seems almost impossible.

And then:

> That human rights "simply follow from the definition of justice" [quoting John Rawls] is at the very least a strange claim, because the notion of "justice" has been theorized at least since the ancient Greeks, whereas the doctrine of human rights was not fully formulated until the 17th Century.

The Greeks?

> Ancient Greek philosophers commonly saw what is right, what is lawful, as being determined by the moral order of the world itself. What is right was not to be found in individuals but in the harmonious order of things.

Continuing on the Greeks and Romans (Hellenistic tradition):

> What was due to a person was determined not by the individual rights they possessed, but by their position in the larger community, and their relationship to the other members of the community. The point of such distributive justice was to aim at social harmony, something that can only be understood in light of the community as a whole; rather than in terms of isolated individual rights.

What changed? Christianity. Ensoulment and God crowded out the harmony of the community.

> Because of [the arguments of Christians], gradually, the moral law came to be seen not as something inherent in the order of things, but something stemming from the Will of God. The importance of order is replaced by the importance of will. [...] The result is a morality built on universal abstract rights which emanate from the will of each individual by virtue of a shared human essence.

And that's just the first quarter of the video. Go watch; it's very informative and lays out its sources and citations in a way that are easy to examine for yourself.