Just Another Word
Just because a country is a democracy doesn’t mean that it values the rule of law, free speech, or any other of the ideas that have somewhat laughingly been called “human rights”.
For examples, see The List: Look Who’s Censoring Now.
Everyone claims to be in favor of human rights, but no two societies seem to have the same idea of what that actually means.
March, 2009 at 8:54 pm
The linked page fails to load.
March, 2009 at 3:53 pm
It loads for me. I’m using Firefox.
April, 2009 at 12:11 am
By human rights they mean something like what has been codified in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – which was widely accepted.
Well developed theories of human rights exist… in fact, of the civil and semi-civil societies, it’s only really people from one of them who typically deny their existence (three guesses which one). Oh, and the fact that the abstract justification for human rights sometimes differs across civilized societies doesn’t mean that the rights themselves are arbitrary.