>It could and it has. But Enzo, these
>examples existed in a society that upheld a liberal
>conception of rights as existing prior to society so
>this is no grounds upon which to reject the
>rights-as-product-of-society model. (Indeed, your
>earlier claims about tradition are, in fact,
>suggestive of thismodel as well) Upholding a liberal
>conception of rights in this
>matter is obviously no guarantee against this problem.
Well, I've never denied my classical-liberal beliefswhich make ever suspicious towards easy constructivistic solutions, appealing to the "esprit de geometrie" but unproven in the physical world. I've seen too many beautiful theories fail miserably the reality test.
>Let me remind you of what I typed at the beginning of
>that post: "In China girl babies were aborted or
>murdered with the
>institution of the one child policy. Is the answer to
>outlaw abortion? No, the answer is to create a
>society in which girl children are not seen as
>inferior."
Agree.
>I would prefer a world in which we recognize that
>rights are NOT universal, that we are NOT born with
>them and so we must vigilantly struggle for them.
>Rights are created by people through political
>struggle. They are socially constructed as it were.
>This means, of course, that we must admit that rights
>aren't universal.
There are basically two ways of intending "we admit that rights are universal": one, descriptive, emphasizing "rights are universal", as if they were God-given and cast in stone; and one, prescriptive, stressing "we admit". While the first, "Lockian" attitude requires an act of belief, and therefore sounds more attractive to people with some sort of religious belief (either theistic or deistic), the second contains an admission of voluntarism, and is perfectly acceptable to agnostic liberals like Hume. I belong in the second camp, as it's probably clear by now.
Also, it seems to me that you are overlooking one point: some subjects are simply unable of fighting for their rights. Shall we wait for the toddlers to storm the Winter Palace before considering infanticide reproachable? At very least, you must admit some kind of "struggle by proxy", which begs the question of why someone chooses to fight for someone else's rights. We can't escape the fact that at least some of the values determining our actions are not socially motivated through the class struggle, but have their origin in our nature: I don't think that even old Karl would have dreamed of denying that. So, back to the square one: what's the point of extrapolating the Marxian analytic framework to a context where it clearly does not apply?
> Rather, they are
>relatively enduring social constructions that rest on
>insitutions, practices, and traditions. However,
>since they are socially constructed, then they are
>also contestable, though not in any way we please.
Yup, and determing which ways are kosher and which ones are not is precisely the crux of the problem: hard work, that can't be easily exorcised by choosing the right set of axioms and throwing them into the dialectic mixer.
Enzo