Getting rights right

"There’s no such thing as human rights,” Bob Jones once said, “not even the right to breath." Uh huh! Right Bob. As this demonstrates, there is a heck of a lot of confusion and a great deal of misunderstanding over the issue of rights. Just ask any student. Or a Council Planner.

Robert Bidinotto comments on the misunderstanding over rights on his blog today, and in doing so helps to explain why libertarians are divided on the Iraq war – something I’ve often been asked to explain.

As Bidinotto says:

…one of the most difficult things is to get people to understand the practical, real-world consequences of abstract philosophical ideas. But in the recent Terry Schiavo controversy, and in the ongoing debate over the Iraq War, we're seeing the (largely unacknowledged) power of philosophy being played out in the form of real life-and-death dramas.

Let me describe one ongoing philosophical controversy that has real-world implications.

Since the end of the Cold War, what had been called the political "Right" has fragmented into a host of warring factions. A major source of that disintegration concerns conflicting conceptions of the concept of "individual rights."

I highly recommend you read on.

Read on here.