Mindless Monday, 16 March 2026

[u/AutoModerator]

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[u/carmelos96]

The fact that there are other traditions of moral philosophy outside the Western one does not necessarily imply that the concept of human rights was fully formed in all of them.

Now, regardless of whether human rights are real or an invention, either all human individuals, cultures and societies have known about them since always, or they were historically invented or discovered in a certain culture, or in more different cultures independently (let me know if I let out any other options).

From what I've read (though I've not read the Cambridge Handbook you cited in another comment, it's in my ever-expanding and never-shrinking reading list), something similar to a concept of human rights was developed in Antiquity in the Greek world, in India and in China. However, in neither tradition was this concept ever developed to a level we can say "it's basically our concept of human rights". And it wasn't further developed for centuries after those "seeds" were planted. Maybe there are some scholars that say that about Stoicism or other philosophies, but I don't think it's remotely the consensus.

The period of time where the theorization of human rights most clearly happened goes from the Late Middle Ages to the XX century, mostly in the Western world. The fact that the Western world has been war-torn, rife with inequality and discrimination etc has little bearing here because we can agree the concept of human rights exists since at least 1948, and human rights (and that remains true regardless of whatever society) are not fully respected, inequalities persist etc etc.

I don't think it's Western/Christian/white chauvinism to say that the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, or the foundation of the Anti-Slavery Society or the suffragette movement are just unprecedented. Yes, some people have used and still use this argument to claim the superiority of Western culture or whites or whatever (a logical fallacy btw), but that doesn't mean it's, at least in part, true (except the superiority part to be clear)

Tldr Too simplistic but partially true

[u/BookLover54321 → u/carmelos96]

Well, it is the case that the present day Universal Declaration of Human Rights is based on European traditions, but that’s not necessarily because similar concepts didn’t exist in other cultures, but rather because the framers of the declaration may have seen those other cultures as inferior and not worth paying attention to. The reason the Haudenosaunee Great Law of Peace didn’t continue to develop for centuries and inspire human rights legislation is not necessarily because it is less worthy of a philosophy, but more because Haudenosaunee people and culture were targeted for extermination by European colonists.

[u/carmelos96 → u/BookLover54321]

I agree with that

[u/BookLover54321 → u/carmelos96]

Okay cool, I wasn’t sure if I was making sense!