Great discussion. I'm no legal or philosophical expert, but I've always instinctively been suspicious of the concept of human rights. Responsibilities & duties make sense - as they're down to me to fulfil, a demand on myself, to live up to a sense of right and wrong. Whereas rights imply a demand on someone else to do something for me & how is that supposed to come about? Nigel Biggar is excellent at explaining abstract ideas clearly & providing concrete examples to illustrate them. Also a nice understated sense of humour. And very good questions from Harrison. Thanks.
This is real quality brain food, and equally needed in the public realm. Reading of Burke recently, it occurred to me that he was pointing to a social substrate - a kind of social soil out of which ideas and impulses will grow - which preceded rights talk and in which it was entirely possible to carry on rights talk but in which it was equally obvious that something was always prior to rights talk, and that was the agreements which people achieved tacitly through behaving reasonably towards each other. This was a real social substrate for everything which Burke urged in favour of. This quickly moves away from analysis of the relations between ideas to consideration of how people actually are, what comprises their sense of all that is reasonable and wanted by them over a course of life. Burke's keen acknowledgment of rights - Indians, Irish, colonists - grew out of something which was not a rational elaboration of abstractions. It arose almost anthropologically - from recognising that this is how people are. Perhaps there is some calculus whereby all of his observations can be abstracted and worked out rationally, but I doubt it. The overall "calculation" was, for him, a human judgment informed by a wide ranging awareness of certain things and an acceptance of them. This simply amounts to something close to a kind of approach which is conservative of social goods in a way similar to environmentalists who seek conservation of natural goods. Listing all of these would be the next thing to do, in what I am writing here. But it is all in books already. Perhaps one of the inbuilt deterrents of a kind of conservatism which refers heavily to Burke is that it is not attractive to crusaders, to cathartic displacement for hot headed social missionaries, and it is resistant to being reduced to intellectual slogans and formal patterns of explanation, so beloved of people who are intellectual but not intelligent.
Woh. Brilliant discourse. Thanks - interviewer's erudition draws out the best from Nigel. Well done young man, Some times your comments are too long, but still a tour de force.
Important to have this discussion, thank you both. We need to understand that rights sit within a legal framework at a practical level, and that upholding the UK legal system (or national) is the greatest way in which a country is held together. Where this is challenged either by something like Sharia internally or the ECHR externally then we undermine our culture as a whole. Any rights need to be balanced against the whole, at least. On a second point a simple way of looking at right is more functionally. One way of doing this is to distinguish between rights as a shield and as a sword. In the hands of activists rights are their weapon of choice and inflict enormous harm on society as a whole. Equal rights to protection such as in the US function to strengthen their culture, more like a shield. Where individual rights are the same for everyone, or equal, then the fabric of society benefits. Where rights are group based then rights create conflict between groups and undermine the fabric of society. We must at least start to think about the effect of granting the wrong sort of rights looked at from a societal point of view. Rights are not 'individual' rights that can be considered out of the wider context, as in the resource point which is excellent also.
Negative constitutional rights presuppose positive entitlements. A person’ right not to be wrongfully killed presupposes the state’s positive duty to maintain a system of law enforcement, as well as the persn’s positive right to be protected from wrongful killing. If you’re bothered by the idea that some people have a positive right to redistrubtion of other people’s wealth, say that. But there is nothing about the notion of law that rules out positive rights, including human positive rights.
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An excellent book on how the idea of "human rights" has been stretched way too far to have any reasonable meaning: "The Debasement of Human Rights: How Politics Sabotage the Ideal of Freedom" by Aaron Rhodes (Encounter, 2018).
This needs to be listened to more than once. Good discussion.
Great discussion. I'm no legal or philosophical expert, but I've always instinctively been suspicious of the concept of human rights. Responsibilities & duties make sense - as they're down to me to fulfil, a demand on myself, to live up to a sense of right and wrong. Whereas rights imply a demand on someone else to do something for me & how is that supposed to come about? Nigel Biggar is excellent at explaining abstract ideas clearly & providing concrete examples to illustrate them. Also a nice understated sense of humour. And very good questions from Harrison. Thanks.
This is real quality brain food, and equally needed in the public realm. Reading of Burke recently, it occurred to me that he was pointing to a social substrate - a kind of social soil out of which ideas and impulses will grow - which preceded rights talk and in which it was entirely possible to carry on rights talk but in which it was equally obvious that something was always prior to rights talk, and that was the agreements which people achieved tacitly through behaving reasonably towards each other. This was a real social substrate for everything which Burke urged in favour of. This quickly moves away from analysis of the relations between ideas to consideration of how people actually are, what comprises their sense of all that is reasonable and wanted by them over a course of life. Burke's keen acknowledgment of rights - Indians, Irish, colonists - grew out of something which was not a rational elaboration of abstractions. It arose almost anthropologically - from recognising that this is how people are. Perhaps there is some calculus whereby all of his observations can be abstracted and worked out rationally, but I doubt it. The overall "calculation" was, for him, a human judgment informed by a wide ranging awareness of certain things and an acceptance of them. This simply amounts to something close to a kind of approach which is conservative of social goods in a way similar to environmentalists who seek conservation of natural goods. Listing all of these would be the next thing to do, in what I am writing here. But it is all in books already. Perhaps one of the inbuilt deterrents of a kind of conservatism which refers heavily to Burke is that it is not attractive to crusaders, to cathartic displacement for hot headed social missionaries, and it is resistant to being reduced to intellectual slogans and formal patterns of explanation, so beloved of people who are intellectual but not intelligent.
Woh. Brilliant discourse. Thanks - interviewer's erudition draws out the best from Nigel. Well done young man, Some times your comments are too long, but still a tour de force.
great interview
All well and good, but it would be interesting to see how Mr. Biggar would think and feel if he were the one dying of thirst.
Great talk. Subbed.
Important to have this discussion, thank you both. We need to understand that rights sit within a legal framework at a practical level, and that upholding the UK legal system (or national) is the greatest way in which a country is held together. Where this is challenged either by something like Sharia internally or the ECHR externally then we undermine our culture as a whole. Any rights need to be balanced against the whole, at least.
On a second point a simple way of looking at right is more functionally. One way of doing this is to distinguish between rights as a shield and as a sword. In the hands of activists rights are their weapon of choice and inflict enormous harm on society as a whole. Equal rights to protection such as in the US function to strengthen their culture, more like a shield. Where individual rights are the same for everyone, or equal, then the fabric of society benefits.
Where rights are group based then rights create conflict between groups and undermine the fabric of society. We must at least start to think about the effect of granting the wrong sort of rights looked at from a societal point of view. Rights are not 'individual' rights that can be considered out of the wider context, as in the resource point which is excellent also.
Is this on Spotify I couldn't find it?
Very interesting stuff
Human rights outside of negative constitutional rights is the most grotesque distortion of the notion of law since Hammurabi.
Negative constitutional rights presuppose positive entitlements. A person’ right not to be wrongfully killed presupposes the state’s positive duty to maintain a system of law enforcement, as well as the persn’s positive right to be protected from wrongful killing. If you’re bothered by the idea that some people have a positive right to redistrubtion of other people’s wealth, say that. But there is nothing about the notion of law that rules out positive rights, including human positive rights.
I really appreciate your efforts! Could you help me with something unrelated: I have a SafePal wallet with USDT, and I have the seed phrase. (alarm fetch churn bridge exercise tape speak race clerk couch crater letter). How should I go about transferring them to Binance?
Lawyers defensive ? Well, turkeys aren't going to vote for Christmas 😅
An excellent book on how the idea of "human rights" has been stretched way too far to have any reasonable meaning: "The Debasement of Human Rights: How Politics Sabotage the Ideal of Freedom" by Aaron Rhodes (Encounter, 2018).