Rightz xplainages

  One argument could be in the sense the fact that in some instances, human rights would have to be violated to increase utility ("trolley problem"). reddit askphilosphy

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhRBsJYWR8Q

Human rights today have the kind of status that the divine right of kings had in the Middle Ages.

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They are so deeply ingrained in our political thinking,

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that imagining a society without them seems almost impossible.

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We all know the famous line from the Declaration of Independence:

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"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,

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that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights,"

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But we should beware of what seems self-evident.

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In many cases, what seems self-evident is less an indication of what is correct or indubitable,

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and more an indication of our biases, an effect of the time and place we live in.

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One of the most influential liberal political philosophers of the 20th century, John Rawls, once even stated that:

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"Human rights are not the consequence of a particular philosophy,

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nor of one way among others of looking at the world.

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They are not tied to the cultural tradition of the West alone,

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even if it was within this tradition that they were formulated for the first time.

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They just follow from the definition of justice."

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That human rights "simply follow from the definition of justice" is, at the very least, a strange claim,

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because the notion of "justice" has been theorized at least since the ancient Greeks.

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Whereas the doctrine of human rights was not fully formulated until the 17th century.

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Can we really untie the definition of justice from the vast majority of the terms' history?

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Whenever we feel like some notion or idea is impossible to do without, there is a kind of therapy we can utilize.

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It's called history.

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By seeing how the idea of human rights emerged,

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we can then situate it as a product of a particular time and place.

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And those hopefully remove the limits that it places on our political imagination.

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A crucial distinction is in order before we begin:

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the distinction between objective rights and subjective rights.

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Objective rights state what is right in general.

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For example, "It is right to bury the dead," "It is right to obey your parents,"

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or "It is right to serve your community."

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Notice that these do not attribute rights to an individual.

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They do not state whose right it is to bury the dead.

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Merely that it is right.

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Subjective rights, on the other hand, are rights that are attributed to an individual, a subject.

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Hence, subjective.

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Examples would include the familiar rights from the Declaration of Independence.

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"I have the right to liberty,"

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"I have the right to property," "I have the right to a fair trial."

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These do not state what is right generally,

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but rather speak of rights as something that someone possesses.

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And it is this category, subjective rights, that constitutes the idea of human rights that we are all so familiar with.

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Something that each human being owns, merely by virtue of being human.

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Today, we pretty much identify "rights" as such with subjective rights.

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If someone speaks of rights, more often than not we can assume they're speaking about the subjective variety.

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Yet, they're actually an incredibly recent invention.

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When, for example, ancient Greeks spoke of what is right, or lawful, or just,

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they have the objective conception in mind.

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To them the idea of subjective right would probably be incomprehensible.

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In fact, sentences in the form of "I have the right to..." something,

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are not even possible to construct in ancient Greek.

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Ancient Greek philosophers commonly saw what is right, what is lawful,

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as being determined by the moral order of the world itself.

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What is right was not to be found in individuals, but in the harmonious order of things.

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In the relationships between the different parts of the world and ones community.

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Roman law famously defined justice as: "giving each person what is due to him"

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Reading this through the spectacles of our times,

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we might assume that what "giving each person what is due to him" means, is something like

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"respecting each person's individual property rights."

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But, as I already mentioned, the notion of a subjective right had not even been formulated at the time.

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What was due to a person was determined not by the individual rights they possessed,

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but by their position in the larger community, and their relationship to the other members of the community.

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The point of such distributive justice was to aim at social harmony,

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something that can only be understood in light of the community as a whole,

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rather than in terms of isolated individual rights.

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So what changed this brand of justice, so different from the one common in our times?

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What made it possible to think of rights as "subjective"?

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Like many things in the history of ""the West,"" one thing in particular is crucial.

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Christianity.

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First of all, Christianity conceived of each individual as having a soul.

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Something which places each person in direct relationship to God,

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and thus gives each person a kind of absolute value.

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Because the soul exists independently both from one's personal qualities and the community one belongs to,

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it becomes possible to view individuals not as the specific members of their community,

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but instead as abstract human beings, each being equal in sharing a common essence.

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Because the soul is both universal and eternal,

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human beings could now be viewed in abstraction from both time and space.

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Independently from the position they occupy in their community, or the world more generally.

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Secondly: certain Christians, for example: William of Ockham,

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eventually argued that if the moral law is inherent in the order of things, it leaves no freedom for God.

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As God must follow the order of things as well.

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Because of this, gradually, the moral law came to be seen not as something inherent in the order of things,

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but something stemming from the will of God.

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The importance of "order" is replaced by the importance of "will".

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Finally, because we are created by God, in the image of God,

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it takes a small step to identify the will of God with the will of each individual.

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Thus, the result is a morality built on universal abstract rights,

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which emanate from the will of each individual, by virtue of a shared human essence.

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We arrive at the full-fledged enlightenment conception of human rights.

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Some might be surprised by the significant role played by Christianity in the development of human rights.

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But this was made very clear in the writings of the theorists developing human rights themselves.

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John Locke, for example, one of the main philosophical influences on the Declaration of Independence,

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started his Theory of Rights from the claim that God owns us as property,

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and therefore endows us with unalienable rights.

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And this is stated in the Declaration of Independence itself:

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"Humans are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights."

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The religious parallels don't end there.

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Human rights and belief in God are also similar in that both are supposed to be something self-evident,

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rather than something you can discover empirically.

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And just as nowadays, people claim that without the doctrine of human rights,

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society would plunge into chaos.

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So people used to argue that society would plunge into chaos without the belief in God.

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So far I've mostly been talking about ideas. Namely, Christian ideas.

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But ideas don't just float around in the heavens.

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In order to be effective, they need to be established materially, in political and social life.

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The influence of Christianity is clear.

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But why is it that the ideology of human rights became so widely and rapidly accepted?

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Specifically in the 17th century and onwards, when Christianity had existed much longer than that.

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Well, if the ideas behind human rights are inseparable from Christian thought,

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then their political influence is inseparable from the rise of capitalism.

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In order for capitalism to kick off,

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the emerging capitalists had to buy a plan that was previously owned communally,

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for the subsistence of the people living on it, and turn it into land owned individually for profit.

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This was known as the enclosure movement,

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during which many peasants, who had previously worked on commonly owned land,

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producing for their own consumption,

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were forcibly and often violently removed from said land.

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And, now property-less, were forced to work for a wage.

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Thus people who previously saw themselves as part of a larger community,

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working together to accomplish shared goals,

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now became isolated and atomized individuals.

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And the production process no longer responsible to their community,

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but to their boss, the individual capitalist.

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Collective solidarity was gradually replaced with individual competition.

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Workers ceased being fellow members in a shared community,

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and became individuals competing for a wage.

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They became, in other words, individuals who got together in production

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in the pursuit of their own private individual interests.

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Workers pursuing a wage, and capitalists pursuing more capital.

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The ideology of human rights went hand-in-hand with the situation.

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It conceived of freedom primarily as negative freedom: freedom "from".

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For example, freedom from interference.

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Replacing the positive collective freedom people experienced in pursuit of shared goals before.

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Competition led people to view each other as something that they must be protected from,

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as something that constantly threatens to infringe on their ""rights.""

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And this is also why social contract theory became so popular.

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Positing that society was created through the establishment of a contract.

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If people are seen as individualized and atomized by default,

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and get together only in pursuit of their own self-interest,

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then the only conceivable way to form a society is to sign a contract.

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This led to the strict separation between what Hegel called civil society on the one hand and the political state on the other.

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Civil society is the society of the market,

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of private individuals pursuing their private interests independently of anyone else.

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The political state, in contrast, is the sphere in which people get together to make common decisions.

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Fixing the excesses of the civil sphere.

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Liberal society was shaped by this fundamental split.

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Private individuals on one side, and the state with its offices, courts, army, and police force on the other.

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Hence, Marx writes:

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"Above all we note the fact that the so called rights of man

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are nothing but the rights of a member of civil society

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i.e. the rights of egoistic man, of man separated from other men and from the community."

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The separation between civil society and the political state splits the individual into two:

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the private, egoistic individual of civil society on the one hand,

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and the political man, the citizen of the political state, on the other.

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This also creates a tension in the ideology of human rights,

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because they're supposed to exist independently of any particular political system,

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but can only be granted to a person if the state recognizes them as a citizen.

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The abstract universal human being is in constant tension

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with the particular citizen of a specific political community.

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The way in which human rights view individuals as universal and abstract

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was also befitting the capitalist production process.

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Because when a capitalist hires workers

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he views them as abstract individuals, defined only by their labor power.

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And because the ideology of human rights posits that rights are formally equal for everyone,

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it helps obscure the vast and real power imbalances that exists between real people.

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For example, the state proclaims that the courts are fair,

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because everyone has an equal right to a fair trial.

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But this equal right obscures the fact that how "fair" your trial is, depends on the lawyer you can afford.

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The doctrine of equal human rights does not actually make people equal.

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It just allows them to be viewed in abstraction,

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from everything that actually makes them the person that they are.

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This is yet another tension found in human rights.

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On the one hand, their supposed purpose is to protect the autonomy of the individual,

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yet by its very nature, it must view human beings in abstraction

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from everything that actually makes them an individual.

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But, even given all of this, it could still be the case that human rights have a net positive value, right?

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We should be careful not to commit a genetic fallacy here.

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Judging that something is bad, solely based on where it came from or how it emerged.

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It could be that rights are valuable,

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even if they were originally declared to legitimate the interests of the emerging capitalist class.

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However, I think that the problem with human rights

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at least as we understand and implement them, is inherent to them.

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To explain why we must ask what their fundamental problem is.

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Let's begin from a starting point that is often overlooked or ignored in theory.

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The enforcement of rights.

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Liberal political theorists, when speaking of rights or laws,

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often avoid speaking of their enforcement like the devil.

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This is because the issue of enforcement brings to light the power dynamics at play.

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Who has the power to enforce?

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But in order for human rights to be effective, they have to be enforced.

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Violently if necessary.

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So who enforces them?

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Well, those who have the power to enforce them.

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Those who control the courts, the military, and the police force.

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Namely the state. A state with the monopoly on violence.

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And in order to enforce such rights they must be more powerful than you,

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and have the permission to commit acts that you yourself cannot.

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And who does the state serve?

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Well, even if liberal ideology says that it serves society as a whole,

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it must by its very nature serve those who fund it.

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Otherwise, it would not receive the capital that allows it to exist in the first place.

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And who primarily funds it?

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The wealthy. In other words, the ruling class.

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It is their interests that it must represent.

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It's not a coincidence that some of the most influential human rights declarations were signed in palaces.

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A fundamental tension immediately begins to emerge here.

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In order for human rights to exist politically,

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there must be someone vastly more powerful than you, giving you those rights in the first place.

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Human rights, which are supposed to make everyone equal,

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paradoxically depend on a fundamental power imbalance between groups with competing interests.

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And if someone more powerful than you is giving you your rights, then they can also take them away.

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But if this is the case, why would the state grant those rights at all?

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Here Nietzsche's conception of rights in the Genealogy of Morals is very helpful.

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He writes: "My rights - are the part of my power

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which others have not merely conceded me, but which they wish me to preserve."

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"How do these others arrive at that? First: through their prudence and fear and caution

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whether in that they expect something similar from us in return,

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or in that they consider that a struggle with us would be perilous or to no purpose."

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So, say the working class is financially and politically impoverished.

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Tired of the situation, they organize together in a militant labor movement and threaten to overthrow the state.

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The state then recognizes the working class as powerful. Powerful enough to pose a threat.

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And because they recognize this power, they decide to implement certain labor rights.

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These rights are not implemented because the state is benevolent,

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or because it's enacting some eternal moral law.

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Rather, they are implementing these rights as a compromise between two competing powerful groups,

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in the hope that this will appease the other party.

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"That is how rights originate: recognized and guaranteed degrees of power."

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This way of looking at rights is more embedded in social and material reality.

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It helps us see how they emerge not as impartial eternal laws, but as the historical outcomes of struggle.

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Nietzsche continues: "If power relationships undergo any material alteration,

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rights disappear and new ones are created -

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as is demonstrated in the continual disappearance and reformation of rights between nations."

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"If our power is materially diminished,

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the feeling of those who have hitherto guaranteed our rights changes:

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they consider whether they can restore us to the full possession we formerly enjoyed -

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if they feel unable to do so, they henceforth deny our "rights""

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So to continue my example: if the working class ends up growing weaker,

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the state that previously granted it additional rights, no longer sees them as necessary and take them away.

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Kind of like what happened in the emergence of neoliberalism in the 80s with Reagan and Thatcher.

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The elimination of previously won labor rights

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corresponded to a rapid weakening of the labour movement.

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In other words: the very existence of human rights

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presupposes the existence of a power struggle of competing groups,

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with the more powerful one granting rights to the weaker one.

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As the journal Gegenstandpunkt writes: "Man has the right to be the servant of a master that attends to him:

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that is the miserable substance of the great Enlightenment notion of the natural human right."

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It's no wonder that the first two countries to declare human rights:

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The United States and France, were also some of the last countries to abolish slavery.

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This power dynamic that we see between classes also exists between countries.

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Take the so-called "right of humanitarian intervention".

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Something with no historical precedent, which states that one nation can invade another,

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for the purpose of stopping human rights violations.

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Who enforces the right of humanitarian intervention?

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Well, again, those who have the power to do so. The militarily and economically powerful.

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This creates a situation in which the powerful can use humanitarian intervention as a pretext

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to invade, destabilize, and exploit other countries, like what the U.S. did with Yugoslavia, Libya, Syria, etc.

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While themselves not being accountable to anyone for their own human rights violations.

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Let me be clear here:

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I'm not saying that all these problems will be fixed if we simply stop adhering to the doctrine of human rights.

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Human rights are an outcome. A symptom of a specific social and political configuration,

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and you don't fight the symptom, you fight the disease.

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If we recognize the problem with human rights,

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it is the social and political configuration that produces them that we have to change.

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So long as we live under capitalism and the liberal political paradigm,

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rights are absolutely necessary.

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But if we limit our struggles to begging for the state to grant us rights,

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we will never address the more fundamental problem that human rights are a response to.

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The fundamental social and political imbalances that constitutes our society.

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The split between civil society and the political states,

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which is inseparable from the split between economic classes.

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We can begin to see at this point that human rights and the divine right of kings

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are actually very similar in significant respects.

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Both are utilized by a minority of the population, the ruling class,

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to justify its rule by appealing to something independent of society.

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Some metaphysical or moral law.

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Compare: "Sure, there are vast power imbalances between us,

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but we're all subjects of God, and we, the kings, are merely carrying out his will."

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And: "Sure, there are vast power imbalances between us,

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but we're all bearers of rights, and we, the state, are merely enforcing those rights."

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In other words: the ideology of human rights, like the ideology of the divine right of kings,

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tries to naturalize a historically contingent political situation.

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Portraying it as something necessary.

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It involves an essential contradiction.

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It declares human rights to be something that exists independently of states,

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even though such human rights inherently presuppose the existence of a state.

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So, what would need to be done in order to establish a society

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that no longer produces or depends on the ideology of human rights?

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It would have to be a society in which the significance of community has been restored.

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A society where collective decision-making is not confined to the state,

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but characterizes society as a whole, starting from the local level.

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A society where production is not the affair of private individuals pursuing their self-interest,

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but a socially planned process.

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It is only when people reclaim power over their own lives and their own activities,

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that they no longer need a state to grant them rights.

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Because their powers would no longer be alienated by a state in the first place.

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When decision-making is no longer the task of a select minority of state functionaries

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and becomes the task of everyone concerned, only then can freedom be realized.

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Not the abstract sham freedom of the atomized individual,

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but the real freedom that can only be realized through association with others.

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Such a society would have done away with the distinction between civil society and the political state,

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between the individual human and the abstract citizen.

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As usual, no one puts it as beautifully as Marx.

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"Only when the real, individual man re-absorbs in himself the abstract citizen,

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and as an individual human being has become a species-being in everyday life,

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in his particular work, and in his particular situation,

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only when man has recognized and organized his "own powers" as social powers,

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and, consequently, no longer separates social power from himself in the shape of political power,

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only then will human emancipation have been accomplished."

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Such a society may be as hard for us to imagine as it would have been for a serf to imagine ours.

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But it is only when we reject the political dogmas of our times that we can begin to envision emancipation.

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And now, let me thank my private individuals of civil society

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collected here only in pursuit of their own self-interest.

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As well as all of these, private, egoistic individuals.

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I'd also like to thank the fellow YouTubers who read out quotes for this video.

24:14

They are great and you can find their info below.

24:17

This has probably been my hottest take yet, because we're going full radical here on YouTube.

24:23

I hope you enjoyed it, and remember:

24:26

Abolish everything. Thank you.

source https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/naoen2/arguments_against_human_rights/

In the Posthumanism of Rosi Braidotti., in a sense she says that "human" has not been a neutral term. But her position here is based on these  things: 

1) Being human is a contested field, there has never been a consensus on what being human is, 

1A) modernity lead to the creation of universal declaration of human rights, but men got the rights, women, blacks, jews, etc did not get the human rights in her mind. She goes on to say that during the French Revolution Olympe de Gouges wrote a universal declaration of women's rights, and pretty immediately she was sent to the guillotine and killed for this act. 

2) Because of above, she claims that notions of human contain relationships that contain power, inclusion, and exclusion.

"The point in common to all poststructuralist philosophies is that ethics is not confired to the realm of rights, distributive justice, or the law. It rather bears close links with the notions of political agency, freedom, and the management of power and power relations. Issues of responsibility are dealt with in terms of alterity or the relationsihps to others, as processes of intensive becoming. This implies accountability, situatedness, and the composition of common planes of active collaborative ethical conduct. A Deleuzaian position, therefore, far from thinking that a liberal individual definition of the subject is the necessary precondition for ehtics, argues that liberal at present hinders the development of new modes of ethical behaviour. (pg. 173)"

She further states more on what various a nomadic ethics (and I should state, that if a person attempts to understand nomadic ethics by looking at actual nomadic cultures, you can be misled, also like if one attempts to understand a Rhizome by looking at a root of Ginger or Tumeric) compared to the traditional ethics entrenched in Liberal humanistic traditions.

"It is simply no the case that the emphasis Deleuze places on the positivity of desire cancels or denies the tensions of conflicting interests. It merely displaces the grounds on which the negotiations take place from an individual to a transversal collectively constituted relational subject. The namadic view of ethics takes place within a monistic ontology that sees subjects as modes of individuation within a common flow of zoe [technical term that she uses against Agamben's "bare life" because zoe is a creative force that constructs possible futures, and it is based on the greek term where we get zoo from]. 

Consequently there is no self-other distinction in the traditional mode, but variations of intensities, assemblages set by affinities and complex synchronizations. This breaks the expectation of mutual repricity that is central to liveral individualism. Accepting the impossibility of mutual recognition and replacing it with one of mutual specification and mutual codepencdence is what is at stake in nomadic ethics of sustainability. This is against both the moral philosophy of rights and the humanistic tradition of making the anthropocentric Other into the privileged site and inescapable horizon of Otherness. (pg 180-181)"

The reason it is a cartography is that she is influenced by her mentors Gilles Deleuze and Michael Foucault, and pointing out the kind of Archive or Episteme that we be used to track "now" and building a map of all the things occurring in the field currently. 

The presentation is about all that one can do during a lecture, but it shines a light on a quirk occurring right now in that human never has been neutral or inclusionary, and that in a sense, we are in realizing (again) the limits of the human. 

In Deleuze's book on Baruch Spinoza -- Spinoza: Practical Philosophy -- he comes up with an interesting idea behind Spinoza's Ethics. That quirk is, in Spinoza's mind, Ethics is an Ethology. Spinoza has an ethics of power that is completely distinct from Virtue Ethics, Deontology, or Utilitarianism. This is partly due to Spinoza's metaphysics, and it is that Spinoza erects an ontology that is not mainly oppositional. Braidotti is a student of Gilles Deleuze and Michael Foucault, but she is also a NeoSpinozist. Baruch Spinoza was viewed by Deleuze the Prince of Philosophers. So, in the argument against human rights, we have to understand the continental tradition that follows Spinoza.

From here  

"We are rethinking the parameters of our humanity. We are at a stage of criticism of anthropocentrism, of the idea of a central species that controls all the others. Post-human is not a great concept. I personally don’t like it, but at the moment we don’t have a better one to designate all the research and experiments being carried out at universities and cultural centres that focus on new ways of thinking about what we are becoming. 

We have developed fascinating new possibilities, such as, for example, genetic manipulation, but our values, our representations, and our ways of understanding are still linked to ancient concepts of the human being.

 We have to be brave and discuss together, in a democratic and critical way, what we want to become. What we are capable of becoming."

"The idea of becoming is essential. We need to open up the meaning of the identity concept towards relations with a multiplicity, with others. Through opposition to the idea of identity as something completely closed, already formed, and static. We are subjects under construction, we are always becoming something." (similar to 4pt Fourth Political theory's conception of becoming or a-temporal)

Here are some of Braidotti's Lectures. Realize that they are lectures and that the depth is limited based on her time for exposition. Basically, they are lectures that tell you to do research and not judge them as they are.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CewnVzOg5w

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6PLJqtDp6Q&t=214s

On a related noted, human rights" are presumably entitlements that people have merely in virtue of being human. As a consequence, they're presumably universal in scope (i.e. all humans have them) and natural (i.e. people have them prior to political institutions).One might press against either of these claims.

source https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/naoen2/arguments_against_human_rights/

recommended from source https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/naoen2/arguments_against_human_rights/ :As per Alain Badiou’s Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil critique of the western liberal conception of ‘human rights’  

Alain Badiou argues that human rights only serves to justify and reinforce the ideology of the status quo  

Alain Badiou's Ethics says that human rights cannot coherently account for the concept of evil.

From this interview: "My personal position is the following: It is necessary to examine, in a detailed way, the contemporary theory of evil, the ideology of human rights, the concept of democracy. It is necessary to show that nothing there leads in the direction of the real emancipation of humanity. It is necessary to reconstruct rights, in everyday life as in politics, of truth and of the good.

We have to seek a ‘new political logic’, Badiou argues that we can only retrieve the political sense of concrete negation (the word negation is what Afro pessimism posits as the way to destroy Anti blackness and to finally emancipate blacks, here it is used similarly but for Queer people) through its subordination to a prior field of affirmation: i.e. the opening of a new possibility inside a given historical situation, or ‘the event’, that may be politically realised through the creation of a ‘new subjective body’ consisting in the social affirmation of those new possibilities. Revolutionary politics is therefore said to rest on a synthesis of, on the one hand, democracy in the sense of spontaneous mass-political irruption, and, on the other, a prescriptive elaboration of the ramifications of the event. The discussion then turns to the question of strategy – outside and against the politically moribund State-form – and his reconfiguration of political universality vis-à-vis the formulations of classical Marxism."

Badiou counterposes capitalist ideology’s implicit anthropology of self-interested animals to his own of subjects embodied in a generic truth-procedure and its concomitant model of political rights, where what is ultimately at stake is ‘the complete transformation of the form of . . . difference, of the way the difference exists’ rather than a materialist dialectics of antagonistic contradiction. The interview concludes with Badiou clarifying his relationship to Lacanian psychoanalysis as an essential but by no means exhaustive conceptual armoury for understanding the relation between subject and event."

mentioned on philosphy subreddit: Simone Weil in her book The Need for Roots she argues against the concept of rights, which she tries to replace with her concept of "obligation" and "justice." She comes to this from being influenced by Marxism, Catholicism, Plato, and anarchism (she moved beyond Marxism, but identified with the others). https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/simone-weil/ https://iep.utm.edu/weil/

From here

Part 1: The Needs of the Soul

Part 1 begins with a discussion of obligations and rights. Weil asserts that obligations are more fundamental than rights, as a right is only meaningful insofar as others fulfil their obligation to respect it. A man alone in the universe, she says, would have obligations but no rights. Rights are therefore "subordinate and relative" to obligations. Weil says that those directing the French Revolution were mistaken in basing their ideas for a new society on the notion of rights rather than obligations,[9] suggesting that a system based on obligations would have been better. Weil claims that while rights are subject to varying conditions, obligations are "eternal", "situated above this world" and "independent of conditions", applying to all human beings. The actual activities which obligations require us to perform, however, may vary depending on circumstances. The most fundamental obligation involves respecting the essential needs of others - the "needs of the soul".

Weil backs up her ideas on the needs of the soul by mentioning that Christian, ancient Egyptian and other traditions have held similar moral views throughout history, particularly on the obligation to help those suffering from hunger. This, Weil says, should serve as a model for other needs of the soul. Weil also makes a distinction between physical needs (such as for food, heating and medical attention) and non-physical needs that are concerned with the "moral side" of life. Both kinds are vital, and the deprivation of these needs causes one to fall into a state "more or less resembling death".

Weil goes into some detail on collectives.[10] She says that obligations are not binding to collectives, but to the individuals of which the collective is composed. Collectives should be respected, not for their own sake, but because they are 'food for mankind'. Collectives that are not 'food for mankind' - harmful or useless collectives - should be removed.

The remainder of Part 1 is divided into sections discussing the essential needs of the soul, which Weil says correspond to basic bodily needs like the requirements for food, warmth and medicine. She says such needs can mostly be grouped into antithetical pairs, such as the needs for rest and activity, or for warmth and coolness, and that they are best satisfied when a balance is struck allowing both needs to be met in turn. In communities where all essential needs are satisfied there will be a "flowering of fraternity, joy, beauty and happiness".[11][12]

https://www.reddit.com/r/Anarchy101/comments/muecp1/if_human_rights_are_a_spook_then_what_am_i/Where do human rights come from? What is a human right if it is not something someone somewhere has agreed upon is a human right? Why should the unique respect of another person claims is a human right? Human Rights can be seen as a spook.(or at best a good spook)  (like 196 meme 'human rights don't exist' egoist)

Though this is not to say that we should not go around trampling on other peoples human rights. 

Though since human rights are for all intents and purposes simply a form of morality they are definitely spooks   (like 196 meme 'human rights don't exist' egoist)

The anticedent of the current conception of human rights was the sense of natural rights and natural law, which is a philosophical construction that specific stuff are so foundational they are viewed as inalienable, but obviously they are routinely alienated so that hasn't precisely helped us much. But essentially a human right is only a moral statement that is looked at as sacred in someway, and so people who think about human and natural rights would likley be described as invollentary egoists.

"Sacred things exist only for the egoist who does not acknowledge himself, the involuntary egoist, for him who is always looking after his own and yet does not count himself as the highest being, who serves only himself and at the same time always thinks he is serving a higher being... ...Because he would like to cease to be an egoist, he looks about in heaven and earth for higher beings to serve and sacrifice himself to; but, however much he shakes and disciplines himself, in the end he does all for his own sake, and the disreputable egoism will not come off him. On this account I call him the involuntary egoist." The ego and his own - Benjamin Tucker translation.

And is it not sort of arbitrary, to talk of morality, and to elevate it so that this moral conception is so fundamental as to no longer being a moral, it is a right, from nature itself. Remember egoism rejects the  concept of morality itself. Morality is also a spook, and so it limits the individual and causes them to remain shackled, even more so than with the law. The law is enforced by violence, morality is enforced by the individuals own mind.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Anarchy101/comments/lwqscz/why_do_egoists_reject_human_rights/ humanspherian

All Individuals have interests, many of whom have shared interests, which still exist when we do not pretend that there are "human rights" associated with them.  (like 196 meme 'human rights don't exist' egoist)

196 reddit Egoism is not the rejection of empathy. Morality might be a spook, at least with our understanding of it. On the Genealogy of Morals by Frederich Nietzsche he discusses such a topic perfectly, "Reason, seriousness, mastery over the emotions, the whole murky affair goes by the name of thought, all the privileges and showpeices of man: what a high price has been paid for them! How much blood and horror is at the bottom of all 'good things'!" (Pdf for On the Genealogy of Morality By Nietzche)

Good and evil as a social dogma are not aligned with Egoism. However, rejecting empathy is rejecting what makes us all human. Egoism is not a rejection of being human

Pedos, for instance undoubtedly harm people physically, emotionally, and mentally. I, as a human being with empathy, do not enjoy that. I love my fellow man/woman, I don't want my fellow man/woman to get hurt. Max Stirner also says something similar, "I love men/women too — not merely individuals, but every one. But I love them with the consciousness of egoism; I love them because love makes me happy, I love because loving is natural to me, because it pleases me. I know no “commandment of love.” I have a fellow-feeling with every feeling being, and their torment torments, their refreshment refreshes me too; I can kill them, not torture them."

To have empathy is among the few things that has saved us. To be huddled around a fire in the cold night 42,000 years ago is what kept people alive. Helping the sick, and hurt, and elderly is not inherently 'morally' good, but it is empathetic. TREY the Explainer has a good video about this. 196 reddit

197