I'll have the Stilton

Simon Jenkins writes a piece today expressing impatience with the way the language of human rights, and human rights legislation, can be bandied this way and that, pressed seemingly in any cause, over-used and abused. In support of his impatience he declares that human rights are nonsense:

Bentham was correct. There are no fundamental human rights. The concept, said the great utilitarian, is "nonsense on stilts". It induces tendentiousness, large legal fees, and possibly war.
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There may be rights under contract, rights tied to obligations, matrimonial rights and rights ordained by statute. There are principles of human dignity and respect that should guide such statutes. We should observe compassion in all things. As the Bible says, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." But you may read as many tomes on human rights as you like and (with your brain slowly fried) you will find yourself back with nonsense on stilts.

Rights can be claim rights or liberty rights:

A claim right is a right one holds against another person or persons who owe a corresponding duty to the right holder.

So, for example, if I have a right to free health care, someone - the government - has a duty to provide that.

[L]iberty rights [are] rights which exist in the absence of any duties not to perform some desired activity and thus consist of those actions one is not prohibited from performing.

I have a liberty right to read the books I want to, to take a walk in the late afternoon, and so forth.

To say that there are fundamental human rights, you need believe no more than that there are rights of both these kinds - claims and liberties - that people should enjoy just in virtue of being human; or, to put the same thing differently, that all human beings, in the very nature of the kind of beings they are, have certain interests in common from which a number of basic moral rights can be derived. That's all. You don't have to believe in a divine creator as a foundation for these rights, though many have. One might argue about what items must go into a list of basic rights, and what items shouldn't; but to say that the very idea of human rights is nonsense is less than good sense.

What is more, Jenkins, making much of the bandying this way and that of human rights talk, helps himself to the implication that if the same arguments being made in terms of rights were made in other terms - of justice, or liberty, or dignity, or risks, or respect - debate in the public sphere would be simpler and clearer. Pull the other one. Each of these terms is subject to its own complexities, to disgreement over meanings, definitional boundary disputes, exploitation, and general coming and going. It's just the nature of the beast that is moral argument and political contestation.