Enzo Michelangeli in quotes, me without:
"...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?"
This isn't oversight. This is the issue. Rights are not universal, however much, voluntaristically or religiously, one wants them to be. That's because, as d-m-c says, they are socially constructed--and yes, that construction includes but is not limited to struggle. It's also because, whether rights are abstractly or socially constructed, they always conflict. Can't get around those conflicts without getting around those rights! The problem with thinking in terms of rights is you end up obsessing about inconsistencies and hypocrisies that turn out to be unavoidable. I doubt if it is possible to construct a system of rights that wouldn't *necessarily* be self-contradictory, know of no proofs either way, but am sure that even if it is possible, it's not been achieved yet. So whatever your system of rights, you have to step outside that system to judge whose rights prevail when they conflict. Me, I'd rather sidestep that rigmarole, and try a discourse not relying on rights.
"At very least,..."
What could be more?
"...you must..."
Really?
"...admit some kind of "struggle by proxy", which begs the question of why someone chooses to fight for someone else's rights."
Indeed. This sentence introduces an idea, a good one, but says nothing about what to do with it. "Admitting" does not function for me as anything other than "acknowledging awareness or guilt". I acknowledge the possibility of "struggle by proxy"--more, I've seen it happen-- with the caveat that I'll be looking hard at self-assigned proxies to see whose proxies they really are.
"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?"
Where does all this come from? Struggle is not limited to class struggle, social motivation neither. Actions are not "determined' by values, or I'll have to forget bourgeois as well as Marxist psyschology, ethology, philosophy, economics, and all that other junk. So, who's extrapolating a Marxian analytic framework?
....Michael Brun