Call it what it is

In my best interest, I am going to try to write more about my "professional" thoughts. Part of why I started this blog was to explain concepts I struggle to understand as a way both to make myself figure it out and to make myself be able to explain it in "real people" terms. So! Here is a thought I have been wrestling with this week from my first class of Introduction to Human Rights.

Human rights are a way to organize society. We know -- have come to agree -- that the fairest, most moral way to organize society is by guaranteeing all people equal opportunity and enjoyment to some 50-odd human rights. A system of implementing, enforcing, and upholding these human rights creates rules for ourselves that do not just give order and expectation. The rules also will produce the maximum happiness for each individual and for the totality of humanity.

That human rights exist is a fairly well-accepted notion around the world. Most international organizations, countries and individuals accept that there are certain entitlements due to all humans by virtue of the fact that they are human.

What human rights exist is also well-settled. People, states, international organizations all pretty much accept the human rights that are laid out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. For example, everyone has the rights to life, liberty, security of person, education, health, and the right to work. Other rights that I particularly endorse are that everyone has the rights to freedom of thought, conscience and religion. While it is a declaration (non-binding), not a treaty (binding on its signatories), the document truly does serve as a foundation for accepted international norms.

So we know human rights exist and we know what they are. The problem comes in figuring out if an action is in accordance with, implements, or enforces what we know are human rights. Context without content.

The issue (finally!) I was trying to understand is why people try to add an extra label to each human right. People like to classify each human right as a particular type: "civil/political," "economic," "self-determination," or "social/cultural." First, I hate this added layer of linguistic fluff. Using different words can be a way to avoid enforcement. If a law upholds the "human right" to leisure time, but someone's case argues for their "economic right" to leisure time, then the law does not apply. Call it what it is.

Second, we run into this problem where now we're not sure if these new classifications become their own single-standing human rights, or if they are sub-categories under the overarching category of "human right." Should we forget about the "human" part and just start calling them "social," "economic," "political" rights? Take, for example, what is going on with indigenous rights. Are those human rights? Are they socio-cultural rights? They also involve civil/political and economic issues, so maybe they are "political" or "economic" rights. Or, maybe indigenous rights are a sui generis framework of rights wholly apart from human rights. Unclear, people, unclear! If we didn't have the stupid classifications, we wouldn't have these linguistic ambiguities that actually cause conceptual ambiguity (weird that sometimes words that come after a thought can "go back" and change what the thought was in the first place). Call it what it is.

Finally, I find these distinctions to be a wholly arbitrary farce. The example given in class was that the right to healthcare is an economic right. Never in a million years would I have first classified healthcare as a right that has to do with money. How is it that my right as a human to have a physically healthy body and sound mind can be classified -- and classified solely -- as a monetary issue? Certainly, in the United States, anyway, healthcare has come to be intertwined with financial concerns both on the part of the individual (access) and the state (burden). But, I do not think that is the essence of the right.

What about the right to refuse healthcare? Or communities that don't use money? Or communities whose Shaman or Medicine Man doesn't charge money? Or a group of peoples whose cultural values deem "healthcare" to be something wholly different from the Western conception of "cure" -- an Eskimo peoples believe the highest form of respect to an ailing elder is to kill them before their honorable life degenerates. My point is, why don't we call human rights by the names that they already have? Rather than presupposing what content must fill the context by using our Western, artificial classifications, we should call it what it is.