I can’t speak for the rest of the world, but US history is lousy with instances of people failing to recognize other people as qualifying for human rights (or being necessarily human). White men have repeatedly argued regarding women and black men that they aren’t fully human, actually.
To be fair, we were creeping up on it slowly even as Jefferson penned the American Declaration of Independence, in which the all men are created equal notion was derived from a universalism that was consistent in the enlightenment-era philosophy of self-governance. But many of our Constitutional framers were slave owners themselves, and beholden to the ownership class at the time, who owned slaves and wanted very much to keep using them. There were abolitionists among them. Some like Jefferson were conflicted between their values and their comforts.
This is why the postbellum Lincoln era abolition movement was so important, as it was another step towards universalizing civil rights in the US. It wasn’t enough to free the slaves and assure former slaves couldn’t be discriminated against, and were allowed to vote. Congress eventually resolved that every man had to be guaranteed civil rights, and that they cannot be discriminated against for any reason.
And we had to take another step to give women suffrage in the 20th century. We still failed to ratify the ERA, though, and we may suffer for it if the Roberts Supreme Court decides to nullify the 19th amendment the way it has nullified the VRA.
As such, the US may be doomed to collapse, first into totalitarianism and then into food and resource crises (as our ownership class are incapable of governing or preserving the social contract). But in the next iteration, if the world doesn’t burn so far as to become uninhabitable, maybe it should be a crime to discriminate against minorities and marginalized groups, or to attempt to legislate to make it legal to do so.
I’m not a legal expert, nor an expert on government, so I don’t know if there is even a solution that protects societies from the consolidation of power to where it can be abused.
Equal rights via equal fights
i disagree, i support stripping the rights of billionaires.
“Yeah idk I just think we should be allowed to ignore [insert minority group here] because they’re small and can’t fight back and I don’t care and actually I just hate them for no reason”
- literally everyone who disagrees with this sentiment
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Some groups prefer to think of themselves as superior. They would rather drain the swimming pools than allow integration.
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“Equal” “rights” is vague. Does equality imply equal outcomes? Do rights include, say, property rights? The ambiguity naturally leads to disagreements. For instance, if I argue for the abolition of private property and you want to give every family their own homestead (where everyone can trade in a market of small producers) we both technically agree on equal rights.
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“But if we protect everyone’s rights equally, who can we manipulate the rubes to look down on while we rob them?” - the government
It is very debatable, do you know how much money that’ll cost!
What are “rights”?
Most of the time this refers to privileges granted by the government.
That’s the neat part, it’s not!
Maybe I’m too pessimistic, but I don’t think this kind of point is debatable. A person who does not share a fundamental care for humanity cannot be debated. The only thing to do is to take away their ability to do harm and hope that interacting with the world without the power to do harm makes them wiser and kinder (assuming that the way you took away their ability to do harm wasn’t a guillotine).
You’re debating with a soulless ghoul diug up from… not-long-ago-enough
The usual argument is where to draw the line, since society deems different things acceptable.
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