Denying Human Rights: A How-To Guide (Part 7)

This is the last of a seven part series of posts that come from a paper I wrote.

Because the paper is somewhat long, I decided to cut it into smaller pieces and post it in seven installments.

Consequently, as you read any of the posts on any given day, there may be a contextual flow of thought that is not readily perceived.

Simply scroll down to find the first post.

Please enjoy.

Denying Human Rights: A How-To Guide (part VII)

When all else fails with regards to denying fundamental human rights to those who should not have them by use of the various steps of the SLED test, it should be noted that one could still, yet deny those rights by taking one more step.
I call it the C-SLED (cumulative SLED).
In other words, if there is any confusion about whether a being meets any single requirement of the SLED test; we simply state that the being must meet them all. In so doing, we safeguard our method for categorizing human beings against those fancy philosophers and theological thinkers that would seek to undermine our efforts in this area. This step is necessary to ensure the outcome that we desire as a result of SLED testing, namely, that only the right human beings receive human rights. It is important for our method to be able to overcome objections and withstand any accusations of mistaken reasoning by those who would attempt to point out any fallacies in what is clearly a well reasoned, logically coherent argument for dividing human beings and objectively determining the legitimacy of any claim to, so called, human rights.

As you can see, it is critically important to have a method for determining which human beings should have human rights, and I believe that if the human race is going to continue to thrive and evolve, this issue of who should and shouldn’t have these rights is of paramount importance and deserves the type of deep thinking and sound reasoning that you have seen demonstrated here.

Denying Human Rights: A How-To Guide Part 6

This is the sixth in a series of posts that come from a paper I wrote for my English class.
Because the paper is long, I decided to cut it into smaller pieces and post it over the next few days.
Consequently, as you read any of the posts on any given day, there may be a contextual flow of thought that is not readily perceived.

Simply scroll down to find the first post.

Please enjoy.

Denying Human Rights: A How-To Guide (part VI)

The criteria we will hereby use to ensure that many human beings
(the right ones, of course) will be considered non-persons and, therefore, may have fundamental human rights denied them, revolves around

Size, Level of development, Environment, and Degree of dependency.

• Everyone knows “size matters.” I propose that, for the purpose of being able to deny fundamental human rights, we create a minimum size requirement. This is not to say that as a human being grows or shrinks that the number of rights would grow or shrink with her, but simply to establish a convenient and eminently measurable way of determining when these rights should begin to be honored and protected. This also provides a way for a human being to go from being a non-person to being a person if just the non-person in question is able to undergo some change that causes him or her or it to gain the correct size. It would seem rather intolerant of me to deny such a poor soul at least the opportunity to improve his lot in life.

• Everyone has differences in their level of development. For example, I am quite advanced, developmentally speaking, in the area of intellect and reasoning capacity. I am also a fine physical specimen, if I do say so myself. Now then, in addition to meeting a minimum size requirement, it seems obvious that there should also be a minimum level of development that a non-person should have to reach before being granted “personhood.” We wouldn’t want a being of serious mental or physical underdevelopment driving around on our roads, casting votes at election time, performing surgery, delivering mail, or even cleaning toilets for that matter. It seems essential, then, to set some sort of minimum standard for mental and physical development, and who better to create such criteria than me. (However, I would entertain arguments in support of the likes of Peter Singer, Richard Dawkins, Marian Van Court, Charles Murray, Christopher Hitchens, Glayde Whitney, and others, who, through their writings in support of atheism and eugenics have shown reasoning capacity that is equal to or better than my own.)
  
• Environment is one of the least controllable factors for non-persons and one of the most variable. Nevertheless, there should be certain environmental “norms” that are established to determine when any given environment is conducive to personhood. In other words, since environmental factors such as availability of nutrients, clean air, temperature variation, access to care, protection from the elements, and so on, clearly have an impact on other important criteria for personhood such as level of development and degree of dependency, they should be taken into consideration any time questions of personhood arise.
  
• Degree of dependency may be the most important measure of personhood. For, what type of being could possibly be considered a person when that being is totally and utterly dependent on someone or something other than itself for its very life? These types of non-persons are the most socially, emotionally, mentally and economically destructive. For example, would there even be a health care crisis in the United States if medical professionals could only focus their attention on persons and forget about non-persons who don’t have fundamental human rights anyway? Clearly, it is the underdeveloped, the small (in one way or another) and environmentally challenged that seem to use up all our resources, thereby creating some type of inverse entitlement system where persons are discriminated against in favor of the vast minority of non-persons. You can readily see why the dependency issue is so crucial. Its impact is widespread and negatively affects the human beings that are most deserving of personhood.

Denying Human Rights: A How-To Guide Part 5

This is the fifth in a series of posts that come from a paper I wrote for my English class.
Because the paper is long, I decided to cut it into smaller pieces and post it over the next few days.
Consequently, as you read any of the posts on any given day, there may be a contextual flow of thought that is not readily perceived.

Simply scroll down to find the beginning.

Please enjoy.

Denying Human Rights: A How-To Guide (part V)

Now for the fun part; determining which of these human beings we will allow to have these fundamental rights to life and treatment with dignity.
Let’s face it; we don’t really want ALL human beings to have these rights do we? We don’t want to go about granting these types of rights all willy-nilly to just anyone, would we? And we certainly wouldn’t want fundamental human rights to interfere with other important rights.
For example, fundamental human rights should not infringe upon science’s rights to certain types of research and testing in the development of cures for various diseases.
The right of a person to choose is an example of another important freedom that fundamental human rights should not infringe upon.
However, it’s easy to see how a being could pass the taxonomic and genetic tests for “human-ness” and still be unworthy of fundamental human rights, isn’t it? It seems necessary then, to create more categories in an effort to further divide human beings into the types that should have fundamental rights and the types that shouldn’t.
Once again, I have a suggestion. Let’s divide human beings into two groups: those that should have fundamental human rights and those that should not.
We will call those who should have these rights, persons, and those that should not, non-persons.
This will provide a way to move from such all-inclusive terminology as “human being,” to more exclusive terminology, “person.” In this way, we will be able to deny the assumption that human beings have rights intrinsically and replace that assumption with a more workable extrinsic system that only allows for human rights when certain conditions have been fulfilled.
I will describe these conditions with the following acronym:
S L E D.