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Ian Underwood's avatar

>First, I think we need to agree that human rights apply equally to all humans, as would the violation of those rights. Any ‘right’ that we do not all share, regardless of race, religion, age, or sex, is not a human right.

No argument from me, but the first thing that pops into my head is the difficulty that many -- perhaps nearly all? -- people would have accepting that an 8-year-old would have the right to keep and bear arms. He's human, right?

Does that mean we'd have to back off some, and say that all humans have a human right to self-defense, but only some humans have the privilege of keeping guns, and still fewer the privilege of bearing them? What kinds of adjustments would we have to make to other human rights?

I suppose we could say that humans who are in some kind of 'custody' have human rights, but those rights are held in trust by their custodians (whether those are parents or guardians or prison guards) until custody ends.

I'm happy to take the hard line: If you're human, you have human rights, and no one gets to violate them. Even though this could lead to undesired outcomes, the 'solutions' are almost always worse than the problems. I'm just saying that's a difficult position to rally people around.

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