Rights are always a political construct, which we devise and grant each other.
American politics is drenched with "rights". The Bill of Rights, natural rights, god-given rights, human rights. Both right and left use "rights" language to claim victimization and seek restitution. But the history goes back much farther, to the Magna Carta and beyond, into the heart of being a social species. Sociality means compromise, giving up some powers in return for other things, some of which are called rights. Good civilized behavior and diligent work entitles us to membership in the group, and benefits such as collective defense and shared resources. Since there can be long time lags between service and repayment, even extending over a lifetime or even multiple generations, a way is needed to keep track of such obligations. One way is to proclaim rights, such as a right to communal fields and pastures for members of the group, in perpetuity.
Thus rights are generally keenly felt as obligations and matters of long-standing, even eternal, usage. But all are social agreements, as our proclivity to murder and execute each other makes clear. If one does not even have an inalienable right to life, what are the others worth? They are neither natural nor god-given, but entirely human-given. They are rhetorical constructs meant to structure our communal relations, hopefully for good of all and the durable continuance of the system, but sometimes, not so much. Indeed, rights can be brutally oppressive, such as those of Brahmins in the Indian caste system, among many others.
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Gun nuts frequently make a fetish of their rights- to guns, self defense, and in various convoluted ways to religious rights and duties. When rights have been written into the law, such as our constitution, that moves them into another rhetorical level- the legal system. But that just expresses and codifies agreements that exist elsewhere in the social system, and which the social system can, through its evolution, change. Gay rights have been an outstanding example, of the destruction of one rights system- that of normative sexuality and marriage rights- and the rise of a new set of rights oriented to personal freedom in the expression and practice of sexuality. Where in ancient times, fecundity was of paramount importance, that need has naturally fallen away as a societal imperative as our societies and planet creak under loads of overpopulation.
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This mutability and social basis of rights leads to a lot of one-upmanship in rights discourse, like the attempts to found abortion rights in presumptively more universal or fundamental rights like privacy, autonomy, or women's rights, versus competing formulations of rights to fetal life with related arguments about the legal and life-like status of embryos and fetuses. All this speaks to the fact that rights are not discovered on tablets handed down by either god or Darwin, but are continually developed out of our feelings about our communities- what is fair based on what is required from each of us to live in them, and what they can reasonably demand and give in return.
- Let's hear it for the neurodivergent.
- Cattle are unsustainable.
- Good riddance.
