Human Rights
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Site Description            Human Rights (linked to sources)

Concept Description

This category overlaps with Law-Government-Commerce and Morality.

Human rights is one of four pillars of modern human values:
  • democracy
  • moral equality of all humans (i.e. human rights)
  • socially responsible capitalism
  • scientism.
This category could just as well have been named Democracy or Equality. It merges four original categories: Equality, Freedom and Security, Gender Rights, Racial Rights. Human rights are based most eloquently on Thomas Jefferson's words in the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and Pursuit of Happiness --- That to secure these Rights, Govenments are instituted among Men, deriving the just Powers from the Consent of the Governed

Why are they self-evident? Everything we can measure about men, espcially if you throw women into the mix, differ from person to person and from time to time. So equality of humans must live not in the material world we can measure, but in the other world of human thought.

What are the other unalienable rights? They are unalienable, right? From God? (or from whatever your Creator is? mine is random chance?). So if they are truly unalienable, it seems the next statement about goverments created to protect rights contradict the idea of "unalienablity". Governments may only restict Life, Liberty, and Pursuit of Happiness by Laws from the spirit world of human thought.

It seems human rights are based on assertions and enthymemes as David Hume demonstrated at about the same time. I benefited from at least the mentioned "unalienable" rights as all current and historical writer-storytellers have since before Homer.