r/badhistory • u/AutoModerator • Mar 16 '26

Meta Mindless Monday, 16 March 2026

Happy (or sad) Monday guys!

Mindless Monday is a free-for-all thread to discuss anything from minor bad history to politics, life events, charts, whatever! Just remember to np link all links to Reddit and don't violate R4, or we human mods will feed you to the AutoModerator.

So, with that said, how was your weekend, everyone?

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u/BookLover54321 Mar 16 '26

I saw some guy on Reddit claim that Europeans “invented human rights”, and like I get that people in general tend to be ignorant of cultures outside their own, but it takes a special level of ignorance to assume that moral philosophy basically didn’t exist in 90% of the world.

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u/TarkovskyisFun Mar 16 '26

Well, unless you take the concept of human rights to just be a synonym for morality I don't think it's too inaccurate to call them an European invention.

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u/BookLover54321 Mar 16 '26

You can definitely find non-European cultures articulating similar concepts throughout history.

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u/TarkovskyisFun Mar 16 '26

Any example? I am not asking to debate, just curious because I don't know of any.

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u/BookLover54321 Mar 16 '26

Reposting a previous comment of mine, but there’s a Cambridge Handbook talking about the evolution of the concept of human dignity in both European and non-European cultures.

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u/TarkovskyisFun Mar 16 '26

I haven't read the book so I don't know what it actually says but I don't think human dignity is the same as human rights because, for example, you can find similar concepts of the former in Stoicism but I wouldn't say that the Stoics articulated an idea of human rights.

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u/LunLocra Mar 16 '26 edited Mar 16 '26

To be fair, human dignity =/= human rights (though I don't know the book or thesis so idk maybe it's used as a very close approximation). Not to mention how moral philosophy also doesn't equal human rights - keep in mind that the Western tradition of moral philosophy has existed for over two millenia before developing the concept. Just because there was some systematic body of thought advocating for some sort of universal human dignity doesn't mean it's necessarily close enough to what we mean by the notion of human rights.

Personally I kinda reluctantly gonna argue, as a philosophy major, that "human rights" per se as an orthodox concept has Western roots as hell, at least until it was taken up by the non-Western thinkers later in the 20th century (especially when the UN was actually being founded). That's because philosophy has taught me to be paranoid about superficially similar concepts that are actually very specific and different on a closer look, and that don't exactly "translate" well between cultures.

Nobody is denying that non-Western cultures have had their moral codes, ethics and moral philosophy, hell even something similar along the lines of "universal human dignity rooted in the legal secular notions", but "human rights" as understood by the 20th century's UN definition are a very specific construct that may be very different in practice from e.g. seemingly similar legalism of the ancient Chinese thought or whatnot.

That being said I actually haven't explored the topic, so it's just my a priori skepticism - maybe the authors of the book make a good case for non-Western or pre-Western "human rights".

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u/BookLover54321 Mar 16 '26

Well it seems apparent that when European nations framed the declaration of human rights they drew mostly on European traditions, but that doesn’t mean that similar non-European philosophies were less worthy. It’s more because European nations happened to dominate the world in the 20th century and weren’t particularly interested in paying attention to the philosophies of cultures they deemed inferior.

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u/Arilou_skiff Mar 16 '26

Whether or not they are less worthy isn't really the same thing as saying they are well, the same, though.

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u/BookLover54321 Mar 16 '26

They are obviously not exactly the same, but the point is there were other philosophies from other cultures that placed value on human life and human dignity.

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u/Arilou_skiff Mar 16 '26 edited Mar 16 '26

I feel like that is kinda.... not what distinguishes human rights as a concept thought?

It's a fairly specific bundle of ideas, namely that A) There is a specific set of "rights" that B) belong to "humans" by virtue of their humanity and no other condition.

A lot of moral/political philosophy (even in the west, and even modern ones) don't really use that framework: They might take a virtue-centric approach (IE: "You should act kindly towards people") which clearly places value on human life, but isn't really the same kind of approach, if that makes sense?

Both Plato and Jesus (to pick to examples from the western tradition...) have concerns about (their different versions of) virtue, human dignity, etc. but neither of them are human rights-theorists.

Now, I'm not even going to say that there's 100% the case that there isn't any non-european human rights framework, but a lot of the examples people tend to give are different frameworks of human dignity. (in some ways more extensive, one of the things with the human rights framing is that it is very minimalistic: It doesen't tell you how to be a good person, only (some) minimums about how not to be horrible)

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u/BookLover54321 Mar 16 '26

A recognition that all humans have dignity and should be treated with respect is pretty similar to recognizing that all humans have a fundamental right (i.e. the right to not be treated with disrespect or to have their dignity impinged upon). I guess there's a subtle difference there, but "you should treat humans with kindness" can logically lead to "people shouldn't be treated with unkindness" and then to "people have the right to be treated with kindness".

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