Politesse
Amor Vincit Omnia
"Rights" are guaranteed by governments, in theory, and by local communities, in practice. If you are viewing them as an abstract ideal, you aren't well prepared to create and enforce them, and are likely to work against your own goals simply because you didn't think ahead to what creating a certain right would actually mean. At the end of the day, rights are local. So if you think a certain goal should be a right everywhere, that means you need to be thinking, case by case, what would such an idea mean in the place I'm proposing to manifest it? What institutional barriers would prevent it? What resources exist in this place to actually help me achieve this goal? Does the thing I'm trying to accomplish make as much sense to the people I'm trying to "help" as it does to me, and if not, what is causing the disparity between our perspectives?
For all intents and purposes, the idea of universal rights is pretty, but fundamentally flawed and therefore useless. We don't have one functioning government over the whole world, so pretending that a right could be granted all at once over all of it is perilously naive. Nor would such a government be able to create rights without contradiction, since any means it used to try and force cultural changes against its constituents would be violating other rights that most would consider valuable, self-determination not the least of them.
For all intents and purposes, the idea of universal rights is pretty, but fundamentally flawed and therefore useless. We don't have one functioning government over the whole world, so pretending that a right could be granted all at once over all of it is perilously naive. Nor would such a government be able to create rights without contradiction, since any means it used to try and force cultural changes against its constituents would be violating other rights that most would consider valuable, self-determination not the least of them.
