Why should the establishment of equal rights be a great achievement by humankind?

Question

And do you even think that equal rights should be considered as a great achievement?

I'm stuck on my essay.

Answer 1

With out the battle for equal rights where would we be? The greatest acheivment that we could possibly make is to treat each other with the respect and dignity and trust that we all want.

Answer 2

Equal rights is a non existant and never attainable state that will ever be played out between the strong and the week, the intelligent and the ignorant, the the driven and the lazy. From the begining of time it has been this way and it will always be. A civilization that thuinks that they have achieved this fictional quest has already signesd their death warrent and has doomed there civilization to being taken over by some one stronger and more intelligent. History has proven this time and time again and even in modern history.

Answer 3

1. Well, if you are stuck, consider all of the equal rights that could be stripped from your life. Could you life comfortably with that?

2. Who has the right to arrogate authority to themselves to exclude people from equal rights? Who are they? Not prophets.

3. Equal taxes = Equal rights for all. If you want to take away rights, them perhaps those singled out should be allowed to pay very less taxes.

Good Luck and Warm Wishes.

Answer 4

Call me a legal positivist if you like, but I think rights only exist if we all acknowledge them. In reality, not everyone does.

Say, for example, the UN declares that every child has the right to access clean water. Is that going to happen?

There are some great achievements of humankind - the odd building, painting, perhaps the occasional legal breakthrough.

I would ask equal rights for whom, established on what legal basis, and why is humankind so special? What about rights for bacteria?

Answer 5

Because of all the atrocities we've had to endure/are enduring to get it.

Equal rights should be expected, not achieved, but we are a backwards species.

Answer 6

Why is the establishment of judgment, the notion of independent judgement valuable in human conflicts? It is noted in human nature there is a tendency of the combatants in a conflict to excalate wrong upon wrong leading to ever increasing damage or destruction to others. The establishment of procedural judgment of a third disinterested party may be appealed to give process of evidence to establish remedy and source of wrongs. When doubt (the oppositive to ego: anti ego) of justice follows what is considered justice in the interests of the combatants, then justice is not felt as real and violence becomes infinite violence and infinitely negative.

It is perhaps the only human achievment as without it no other achievements could follow.

Some reading material on Right.

'§ 497.

Now so long as (compared against this show) the one intrinsically right, still presumed identical with the several titles, is affirmed, willed, and recognised, the only diversity lies in this, that the special thing is subsumed under the one law or right by the particular will of these several persons. This is naive, non-malicious wrong. Such wrong in the several claimants is a simple negative judgement, expressing the civil suit. To settle it there is required a third judgement, which, as the judgement of the intrinsically right, is disinterested, and a power of giving the one right existence as against that semblance. '

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/sp/osabstra.htm#OS493

'Hegel’s Philosophy of Right

First Part: Abstract Right
iii Wrong
A: Non-Malicious Wrong - B: Fraud - C: Crime

§ 82

In contract the principle of rightness is present as something posited, while its inner universality is there as something common in the arbitrariness and particular will of the parties. This appearance of right, in which right and its essential embodiment, the particular will, correspond immediately, i.e. fortuitously, proceeds in wrong to become a show, an opposition between the principle of rightness and the particular will as that in which right becomes particularised. But the truth of this show is its nullity and the fact that right reasserts itself by negating this negation of itself. In this process the right is mediated by returning into itself out of the negation of itself; thereby it makes itself actual and valid, while at the start it was only implicit and something immediate.

Addition: The principle of rightness, the universal will, receives its essential determinate character through the particular will, and so is in relation with something which is inessential. This is the relation of essence to its appearance. Even if the appearance corresponds with the essence, still, looked at from another point of view, it fails to correspond with it, since appearance is the stage of contingency, essence related to the inessential. In wrong, however, appearance proceeds to become a show. A show is a determinate existence inadequate to the essence, the empty disjunction and positing of the essence, so that in both essence and show the distinction of the one from the other is present as sheer difference. The show, therefore, is the falsity which disappears in claiming independent existence; and in the course of the show’s disappearance the essence reveals itself as essence, i.e. as the authority of the show. The essence has negated that which negated it and so is corroborated. Wrong is a show of this kind, and, when it disappears, it acquires the character of something fixed and valid. What is here called the essence is just the principle of rightness, and in contrast with it the particular will annuls itself as a falsity. Hitherto the being of the right has been immediate only, but now it is actual because it returns out of its negation. The actual is the effectual; in its otherness it still holds fast to itself, while anything immediate remains susceptible of negation.'

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/pr/prwrong.htm#PR82

'B. Administration of Justice
a: Right as Law b: Determinate Law c: Courts

§ 209

The relatedness arising from the reciprocal bearing on one another of needs and labour to satisfy these is first of all reflected into itself as infinite personality, as abstract right. But it is this very sphere of relatedness — a sphere of education, which gives abstract right the determinate existence of being something universally recognised, known, and willed, and having a validity and an objective actuality mediated by this known and willed character.

Remark: It is part of education, of thinking as the consciousness of the single in the form of universality, that the ego comes to be apprehended as a universal person in which all are identical. A man counts as ‘a man in virtue of his manhood alone, not because he is a Jew, Catholic, Protestant, German, Italian, &c. This is an assertion which thinking ratifies and to be conscious of it is of infinite importance. It is defective only when it is crystallised, e.g. as a cosmopolitanism in opposition to the concrete life of the state.
'

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/pr/prcivils.htm#PR209