Human Rights?

March 17, 2008

Man, I’m screwed. I have to pass a paper on applied ethics tomorrow and I still have no idea on what topic to tackle. I intended to write about humans eating each other, but I reckon it’s hard to write about. It should be fun but I couldn’t figure out how to tackle it. For me, it’s okay for human beings to eat other human beings if they really have to, and this is quite possible if everyone agreed to eat each other—human rights, for me, are not inalienable, self-evident, or natural, but rather as social constructs—but at this point in human civilization, I’m pretty sure that I don’t want to eat YOU. 

 

So I went for second best. I’d write about human rights and why I think they’re just an invention of men and women. Hobbes, Locke and Rosseau believed that our society is organized by social contracts—basically, an agreement to do this instead of this and giving the power to enforce such rules to a government. However, they seem to base it on natural rights, or rights inherent to human beings (if I’m not mistaken). 

 
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The Good: Utilitarianism

The utilitarians believe that what is good is something that advances the maximum number of people’s happiness. Rule-utilitarians hold that an action is good if it is executed according to a society’s given conventions, or rules. Act-utilitarians, on the other hand, say that a good action is something that produced a positive consequence, that is, to advance happiness and to diminish misery. However, according to De Castro, these two views on how to know the good is fundamentally the same.

Consider: a pregnant seventeen-year old Filipina wants to know if aborting her baby is the right (or good) thing to do. Rule-utilitarians would tell her not to abort the baby, because it is illegal and socially unacceptable in the Philippines. If she follows this maxim, the baby will live—and being alive is generally considered to be a good thing in most philosophies as well as most societies. Therefore, if the girl follows the conventions, the consequences will be good, i.e., she does not become a murderess and one person is given life. In this case, rule-and act-utilitarianism are mutually inclusive.

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