The “basic principles of human rights” could – as you insist above – just be an illusion since EVERYTHING could be an illuson. So, it is not me who am trying to “question the basic principles of human rights,” it is you, by your inability to consent to properly basic experiences who are putting all of reality into jeopardy, including basic human rights.
The rational basis for justice, by the way, is the logical principle of treat like things alike in the respects which they are alike.
And the basic principles of human rights derive from the nature of humanity, human moral agency, the teleological nature of existence and the fact that the ground of all Being values humans and endows us with rights to pursue that which is intrinsically good for us.
Absent those, rights are determinably not basic nor warranted precisely because they are illusory unless God exists to underwrite them as the ultimate ground of Being.
You’re mistaking me for an extreme skeptic. I personally believe that the objects that I touch exist. However, I was merely trying to make the point that such a belief is just as arbitrary as believing in God. Carnap would have much to say about the abuse of his precious theory of verificationism in the name of the so-called “fact-based” faith.
Have you ever read Rousseau’s
Discourse on the Origin of Inequality? In it he details one of the big things that sets mankind apart is its language capacity and its ability to give meaning. It’s a fairly Cartesian understanding of the difference between humans and animals: we have minds and animals don’t. Hence, we have free will and creativity and animals don’t since they are robots/machines. Setting that aside, even if animals have minds, the fact remains that we display much more creativity than any animal does. Rousseau gives some deep insights into this basic human nature. First, humans are not so much guided by instinct as in that they have a will which involves creativity. Second, and therefore, since this trait is the fundamental human nature that is most obvious, it stands to reason that any social arrangement or other-individual action that impedes this creativity must therefore be justified. This still leaves us with not a complete moral compass, I’d admit, but it gives a pretty good basic framework with how to conduct oneself in family-life, political affairs etc.
Censoring a newspaper is an effort to control thought, which attacks the heart of creativity: the mind. Thus it can hardly ever, if ever, be justified. However, slapping your son’s hand as he attempts to touch a hot iron can be justified. Although you slapped his hand and thus thwarted his personal exploration of the world in his own creative enterprise, you saved his hand from great harm. He will thus probably live to create another day for all the better.
God is not necessary for this basic argument in the least bit.
And as for whether or not your own 1st person human rights exist, well the answer is yes. Your own creativity is immediately accessible to introspection. It is not necessarily dependent upon outside empirical factors. So your attempted argument makes no sense here.
