we are a naturally war-like species, and have done awful things to each other, even in our ‘natural state’. In fact, there simply are no rights without society, which is the world which Locke proposes in which we are all nice to each other, as there is no-one for these rights to be broken by or any comparative to make. We must consider rights of people within society, as, generally speaking, everyone lives within society. Before society, this ‘natural law’ would have been violent and loose. So instead I propose that having human rights in our minds is right because it is simply the most utilitarian thing to do. Whether we put these rights into law or not it doesn’t matter, as long as we remind ourselves what causes the most people to be happy in today’s societies– after all, the universal declaration was made after the horrors of world war two – if they are necessary to stop ourselves hurting each other, we must have them even if there is no logical reason for their existence other than the utilitarian argument that lots of people being happy is good. One can easily argue that our human rights need to be given to everyone equally. Because every human on earth has a natural human nature which tells that that they will feel bad if certain things are done to them, then every other human should respect those rights that they themselves feel. This is often known as the ‘ethic of reciprocity’, something found in many religions, laws and in our natural morality. I believe that this inner morality does exist to some extent: arising out of the fact that, as animals that live in groups, humans need to be told a certain set of laws so that they don’t all kill each other and threaten the future of the species. Even if two people live under different social environments, their feeling towards a certain set of things is almost certainly the same. For example, no matter where you go in the world, or even into the depths of history, death is regarded as a bad thing to experience: a product of our evolution. Therefore, surely every human should be guarded from this if they want to, and anyone who attempts to break this rule is breaking a universal human right. By living in a society, there is a contractual obligation to respect other people’s human rights, and it is the state’s basic role to make sure that this happens. This existence of a ‘social contract’ was first postured by Thomas Hobbes. We can see from history that man’s morals are not sufficient to prevent us from doing terrible things to each other, and this often stems from a disrespect of a group’s human rights. Whether or not human rights are actually universal is irrelevant if not reaffirming their universality leads to one group of people being punished by the dangerous lack of natural morality that some other groups have. By denying that human rights are universal surely leads to discrimination: especially if this idea or declaration that they are not comes from one group and is used by the state to promote an agenda that may include violence to champion over other groups. This is clearly evident in the horrors of the Holocaust during the Second World War: human rights not being universal could clearly lead to a less happy world to live in. The natural state of man, as I mentioned earlier, is to not respect other people’s feelings, and so we need universal human rights to work in alliance with the state’s laws to protect people. Without the idea of human rights applying to everyone, society could break down very quickly and all of our rights could be lost. If the reason that we have human rights is because we are human, then, as we are all human, our rights must be universal. Why human rights are universal
The role of the state in universal human rights
Human rights mean almost nothing if they are not put in to force by some actor in some way, and this actor is usually the state and the way is usually by passing laws, democratic or undemocratic. Many of these laws are made to protect others from suffering human rights violations, but I have a big problem with the fact that a state usually makes these grand declaration of universal human rights. By doing this, it becomes the source of morality for effectively every human alive, an impossible task that clearly leads to a division between the natural or desired morality of the people towards other
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