http://www.veritas.org - Why human rights? How do we know they exist? What is our grounding for human rights? Christopher Hitchens and John Haldane discuss an issue of enduring importance at The Veritas Forum at Oxford, 2010. Watch the full-length discussion at veritas.org: http://www.veritas.org/Media.aspx#/v/947
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"[Human rights] are certainly not from God. If they were, a few more people would have them, or have had them. The concept is only a few hundred years old; it had to be wrung out of the bogus concept that there was a right, but it was a divine right, and only for kings. It's an attempt to negate and spread that, made by Thomas Paine. My strong suspicion is also you don't get the rights you don't fight for." - Christopher Hitchens
"I think we stand in need of a philosophical account or an ethical account of what it is to be human, such that we can fill in things like the Golden Rule, so we know who falls within the scope of that. Now I think that when we look around for such, the richest understanding of that comes from religious directions. That's the claim. It's not meant to be a deduction, strictly, of that. It's meant to be a question, if you like, of what provides the best account or explanation—and in the meantime, it also stands as a challenge to secular accounts that simply would treat these things as free-standing, as if they simply arise without explanation." - John Haldane