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.