A debate on human rights. Please take part.

My debate is on numbers 5,6,7,8

5) Strikes,vacations and holidays in a certain company are not allowed: ANY company is free to set its OWN rules which the employees should respect. Should they violate those rules, the employees can simply go and look for ANOTHER company that has rules that suit them. It is not
a violation of human rights, though it maybe an unorganized, unpleasant way of dealing with employees.

6) Physical torture: Well, what if a mad person doesn't understand if you talk to him, teach him, yell at him, make him pay, punish him, deprive him..you try alll possible diplomatic peaceful civic ways to make him understand and he doesnt. He keeps on fighting back unjustly and even
hurting and causing trouble or pain.
Am I left with a choice??
No choice but to try physical torture. It would be my LAST choice...but still a choice I would use in extraordinary cases with extraordinary people..

7) Sentence to death:
What if a mad man murdered my wife, stabbed my 2 year old son with a knife, and burned the house on them.
Do you think it would be fair, humane or even logic to keep that man ALIVE????? NO WAY!I would also make sure he would suffer before he dies.

8) An organization was banned because of the religion it preached
Well, if this religion is banned in the country because of what it calls for or for the sake of social stability or in order not to ignite a civil war or something... then this religion shouldnt be preached or practiced. Especially in secularist countries, religion is banned in public places.

5 and 6 definitely, and probably 9 as well.

5 - In any situation in which an individual works for another individual and gets paid by that individual, the right of the one to employ the other is offset by the right of the other to challenge the terms of emplyment. In other words, they should be allowed to strike. However, there should also be no obligation for the employer to rehire any strikers.

6 - No human being should be able to force another to his will. This ties into 9 too, since that's what it could easily lead to.

And for the others:

1- That's entirely dependant on what having a birth cirtificate actually means.

2 - Human rights does not mean you that the right to decide where and to whom you were born.

3 - This depends on whether it is forced and whether it is similar to torture.

4 - This depends what you mean by "preferring".

7 - If you take away someone else's rights, I beleive this may be valid punishment in some cases.

8 - While I don't think religious descrimination should be practiced, religion is a choice, unlike race, class, and sexual orientation, and voicing it is also a choice. Depending on under what contract the organization was banned and who banned them, it may be right, or unreasonable.

There are some occupations where it is dangerous to be able to strike at any time - police officers, hospital workers, army members, etc.

In France they take advantage of striking, they get paid the days they strike and a lot of things stay closed. While I was there the Louvre was down for 3 days because of it - and apparently that's perfectly normal. Whenever they want paid vacation, they don't show up to work (and at the same time ask for higher wages, etc.)

I don't think striking should be illegal, but the issue is more complicated than it seems.

I think it is okay to put a person to death if they are clearly a danger to society and could not be released from prison: ex: Charles Manson.

Why do they get paid for striking? That's stupid. If the employer can't get the job done while the employees are on strike, he has two options - fire the emplyees and hire new ones, or agree to the terms.

Re: A debate on human rights. Please take part.
Well, what are human rights? What do we as humans have a right to? Food? Equality? It's hard to say because as the quality of society changes, so do human rights.

Everyone's answer to this question would have been clouded by either their upbringing or life experiences. For example, some guy might have experienced a nasty worker's strike, or something to that sort, and now he feels very strong about that particular choice.

So for me to answer this question, I must know, what are human rights?

Well, there's also logic. I've seen nasty worker's strikes where all the busses in the city stopped running and then the price went up to like $1. But if you actually took the time and thought about it, the problem isn't that the bus drivers aren't getting enough, the problem is that the union has the bus company by the balls.

The way it should work is that the employees are beholden to the employer, and the employer is beholden to the employees. Mutual dependance - that's capitalism.

Rufio - that was well said.

Didn't I have an argument with you about somthing once? If so, what was it?

Your so called "logic" has been taught to you by earlier generations. If the your predecessors told you that rolling dice appropriated logic, you'd go for it.

There are no inherent "human rights." The only rights you have are those granted to you by the society in which you live.

That said, I would prefer to live in a society in which no person would go without the basics of food, clothing, shelter, medical care, education, and equal protection, and each person would have maximum freedom consistent with the civil rights and responsibilities necessary for that society to function. The only absolute responsibilities I can come up with are:

Do not cause unnecessary pain.
Love and educate children.

Physical torture is a clear violation. So is abandoning a baby instead of giving it to someone for legal adoption or denying someone necessary shelter/food.

Everything else is debatable.

Idealism presupposes the natural human rights.

Undebatable: 4)
Debatable: other items.

(By this I mean institutional but not necessarily personal preferences.)

Well, no one is equal, if you want to get down to personal bias and preference. I like my family better than I like you (or I should, anyway). Does that make me a bad person?

Sure, we would. But logic has consistent rules. You can't just say what goes and what doesn't - it's kind of like applying the scientific method to a wider variety of areas. It has to be proven correct/incorrect by consistent observation and fulfillment of predicted rules (testing.) Who says there's somthing inherently illogical about rolling dice? What if I wanted to calculate randomness from six sides?

By the way, where's my oracle bone :wink:?

Like Terry (!) and Child of the Light I feel that "human rights" are negotiable and tend to apply locally rather than universally. Our sense of "morality" (if not derived from an "altruism" gene) seems to come from a mixture of expediency and empathy, and therefore tends to shift with the tides of history.

truth
Rufio, you say that mutual dependence (between workers and employers) is a characteristic of capitalism. I wish that were so. If there is any mutual dependence it is certainly far from symmetrical. I'm afraid the essential nature of capitalism is greed, exploitation, competition, the maximization of profits and minimization of costs of production. Unbridled capitalism can be monstrous, but when properly regulated it can be, like fire, very beneficial.

there are so many ifs, buts and maybes about human rights. many have been covered here already. Responsibility to serve & keep society safe as a whole is the guiding light.

I have the right not to be subjected to other people invading my home with junk. Unwanted phone calls, people cold calling on my doorstep, advertising leaflets, e-mails. People wasting my time doing surveys in shopping malls. sure you can ignore all of that stuff but untill it's there you can't get rid of it.

I have a right to peace & quiet.

I didn't say it was characteristic of the way it's interpreted, JL, I said that's what it was. Capitalism is about greed and competition, true, but it is not about exploitation. The essence of capitalism is that people are each given control over their source of income, and if they choose to surrender that control it is by their leave and under their conditions. Anything else is not capitalism.

Re: truth


Actually, it is often government intervention that can get in the way of healthy competition. A little governmnet intervention is good, but they've interfered a lot after FDR politics and they tend to favor people who already have money and give them money. For example, there are lots of nitty gritty laws regulating the telecommunications industry that have more to do with political favors and voting blocs than helping the American populus.

Re: truth


Actually, it is often government intervention that can get in the way of healthy competition. A little governmnet intervention is good, but they tend to favor people who already have money and give them money. For example, there are lots of nitty gritty laws regulating the telecommunications industry that have more to do with political favors than helping the American populus.

truth
Agreed, Portal Star. The great calamity of the 1990s is the deterioration of our regulatory bodies, and now the Bush administration's servitude to irresponsibile corporations.
When I said "when properly regulated" I was referring in part to the prevention of collusion, monopolies, and other irregularities, not to governmental practices that stifle "healthy competition."

Rufio, you say that exploitation is not a characteristic of capitalism? That may be true of some idealization you are entertaining. But if you look at the history of actual capitalism, you wouldn't say that.