The Problem With Human Rights
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN commenters recommend it as a deeper philosophical look at human rights from a critical Marxist angle.
What it is
A philosophy video critiquing the concept of human rights from a Marxist perspective, drawing on Locke, Marx, Nietzsche, Hegel and Rawls. It examines what human rights actually mean and presuppose.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2020 to 2024.
What Hacker News said
Recommends Kednicma · 2020-08 · on ““Time of the Magicians” – philosophy's great decade?”
No, the entire conception of rights is tied to liberalism, and itself is not the end of human moral ideology. Rights are good compromises: If we all broadly agree that humans are entitled to some right R, then R will become a social institution which we enshrine and protect, and that is good enough for society to make progress and people to get on with their lives. For a deeper look, try this Marxist approach, "The Problem With Human Rights" [0]. As both they and I want to emphasize, the goal isn't to take away rights or to disenfranchise people, but to explore exactly what we mean when we say that people are endowed with inalienable rights and what we want governments to do about it. [0] [V
Recommends jedimind · 2021-11 · on “Singapore’s tech-utopia and surveillance state”
That was a rhetorical question I suppose, in the sense of "whose definition is supposedly the universal one": Jonas Čeika has philosophical deep dive [0] into the topic of human rights worth watching. [0] [this video]
Cites pas · 2024-06 · on “Lynn Conway has died”
Yeah, I had the exact same sentiment. (As in "sure we don't live in a perfect world, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to set goals as a bare minimum baseline".) Oh, here's one more video on human rights [this video] (by Jonas Čeika - CCK Philosophy, a collectivist/Marxist?)