Legal Rights

Human rights

Theoretically there are certain rights that the governments are required to protect the best known legal document that summaries these is the Universal declaration of Human Rights. The document sets to achieve that all humans have inalienable rights that include the right to life, liberty, security, not to be enslaved, the right of freedom of thought, conscience and religion. Bentham devised that through utilitarianism, the greatest good for the greatest number principle; he could separate law from morality. This is in great contrast to Nozick who clearly showed that one persons right often stands juxtaposed with another’s. Utilitarianism isn’t a plausible way to look at moral issues.

Utilitarianism would solve the issue as follows:

There is a shortage of body parts in a hospital. Outside there are many homeless people without identification and without anyone who would look for them if they disappeared. Therefore, it would maximize happiness of not only those who had new body parts, but also of the homeless who had no food, to dissect and use them for a greater cause.

Thus, there is a rather chilling issue that people can be exploited if a greater happiness were to happenstance from their demise.

Rights only cater for the interests of the powerful

Rights are nothing more than a beautiful guise that creates an illusory veil of equality, whilst, all awhile, serving the interests of the bourgeois (capitalists). Although, often mocked as simplistic, Marx sole heartedly believed that rights were inexpiable with a person. Public healthcare may be a right for everyone but in the long run that directly benefits from a fit strong army of servants. Safety, the police look out for the interests of the property owners. They arrest those who are unsavoury, and, threaten to cause disharmony with the workers. This, as Marx says, is nothing more than illusions to set apart and believe that the capitalists actually care for the well being of those they oppress. To believe that they do is miserable absurd nonsense. The proletariat is he same as a workhorse, fit to the interest of the capitalists or live in solitude on minimal wage out of sight. If rights were intrinsic then there wouldn’t be such substantial skews to western democracy as a normative: A theory of Justice, Rawls, 1971. The perspective of the class in control is always an outer perception of their interest, an interest to gain those weaker into subservient labour, and not a super-cultural phenomena as others contend.

Australia and a Bill of Rights

Society should have rights that are inalienable against attach from the government. The right to respect privacy, respect the individual and respect property all seem intrinsic, and yet, there is a lack of rights within Australia. Majoritarian decision-making can lead to countless atrocities. Justice Jackson, in the case of West Virginia State Board of Education v Barnette (1943) famously stated that the ‘very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials and to establish them as legal principles to ne applied by the courts. One’s right to life, liberty, and property, to freedom of speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly, and other fundamental rights may be submitted to vote; they depend on no outcome of elections’. There is however much contention as to putting such force behind a constitutionalist conjecture for it is counter-majoritarianism and limits the power of public concern legislating. In Australia there are certain restrictions and implied rights, but are immaterial to those athwart to unyielding rights.

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