The “fashion” argument doesn’t transcend everything, so says the agent of change who sees human rights as valuable and an important part of human life.
There’s not much that can be denied about “rights”, as they are termed, but perhaps the guarantor of these rights is not as easy to contact as Amazon, for example.
The United Nations has not opened a phone line as it were, and so ‘getting through’ isn’t so easy at the moment. It takes more than a phone call to get that problem sorted.
The issue of rights isn’t new, but it’s novel to have to talk about them in such clear terms as every day life.
They don’t fit in with how we’ve seen things before, between us, so it’s new to have to factor in the inalienable rights of another person as we figure out who they are, and how to treat them.
This isn’t in Jane Austen’s works, for example, and neither is it in some of the older textbooks that pertain to former times.
There wasn’t a legal obligation in those days for what we discuss today. There was simply a “yes” or a “no”, or a perceived “right” or a perceived “wrong”.
Today, we’re more certain.
We’re so certain in fact that many people have a deep need for and appreciation of what human rights doctrine says in international law.
After all, this is where they’re guaranteed in law. It’s not a national legislature that decides these things, or has the last say, but it’s from our roots as a common species these things come from and are decided by.
It’s not up to us as individuals, but we’re more protected – and our wellbeing is more guaranteed – than we were previously led to understand, or believe.
