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by dalbasal
2138 days ago
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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. |
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> 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.