forbid certain other rights of a less ethically desirable nature, or what status the undisputed possessor of a right who is either unable to exercise it due to impairment, or simply chooses not to, has 146 . It has also been asserted that such rights do not exist 147 . Simply, beyond something similar to a legal nicety and convention, although highly desirable and meta-ethical, basic, natural, human, civil and legal rights are so obviously not inalienable or self-evident as to raise serious doubts about their efficacy, purpose and metaphysical existence as a whole, which is a highly unsatisfactory position for any conceptual element of a claim to a first principle of governance to occupy. The second is that, whilst “human” seems a functional and obvious reduction of the concepts of civil, legal, basic and natural for the purposes of a criterion to decide the scope of their application. A satisfactory definition of “human” that encompasses not only the current extant population of six billion diverse individuals at a time of 146 European Convention on Human Rights at http://www.echr.coe.int/Documents/Convention_ENG.pdf, Universal Declaration of Human Rights at http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration- human-rights/, US Bill of Rights at http://www.billofrightsinstitute.org/founding-documents/bill-of-rights/, CFR at http://www.europarl.europa.eu/charter/pdf/text_en.pdf, and Gewirth, A., “The Epistemology of Human Rights”, Social Philosophy and Policy, Vol. 1, Issue 2, Spring 1984, pp. 1-24, Locke, J., Two Treatises of Government , at http://socserv2.socsci.mcmaster.ca/econ/ugcm/3ll3/locke/government.pdf, , Paine, T., The Rights of Man , at http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/documents/1786- 1800/thomas-paine-the-rights-of-man/text.php, Hegel, G. F. W., The Philosophy of Right at http://socserv2.socsci.mcmaster.ca/econ/ugcm/3ll3/hegel/right.pdf and Kant, I., Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals at http://www.inp.uw.edu.pl/mdsie/Political_Thought/Kant%20- %20groundwork%20for%20the%20metaphysics%20of%20morals%20with
%20essays.pdf, all retrieved 19/04/2016 at 14:21 147 See Nietzsche, F., On the Genealogy of Morals at http://www.inp.uw.edu.pl/mdsie/Political_Thought/Nie- GenologyofMorals.pdf, Essay 2, Sec. 9.
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