Sorry Schmuck, but I’ll stick with my opinion rather than with that of an unnamed ‘Israeli philosopher’. One of the most basic and important rights is to be able to form ones own opinion as that Israeli, you and I have done.

Not ‘all human beings’ have the rights you believe they do. They have forfeited them. On the assumption that you are a decent person, I doubt that you would want me to treat you the way I would treat, say Saddam Hussein. I also doubt that many of the people who have suffered at the hands of that foul creature would want to give him ‘equal rights’, either. We innately recognise good from bad, bad people from good people. There is no philosophy to dictate what we think.

When you speak of terrorists and their ‘reasons’ for being terrorists, you are talking about severely deranged people, well outside the accepted norms, and not worthy of bringing into the argument.

You ask: ‘Don’t you see that if we abandon a simple belief that nobody ever should be treated in certain ways …… we will descend into barbarity?’

No, Schmuck. I do not see that. I already know, as you do, that people should not be treated in ‘certain ways’. Going soft on people who do not believe this will mean that more people will descend into barbarity if they are not dealt with harshly. They know very well the difference between right and wrong. Unlike you and me, they deliberately override the switch that prevents them from doing wrong. No one is born bad. They learn from example and lax punishment more concerned with their ‘rights’ than those of their victims

Boaz,

I totally agree with you that the danger is relativism. And I also think you are right that we need to be very vigilant that certain limits to behaviour are kept. You are absolutely right that sometimes these limits are violated.

It's just that I think that the best way to keep those limits and to avoid relativism is precisely to insist on people's rights. Rights serve the purpose of defining a boundary beyond which governments cannot go, and therefore provide a limitation to democratic debate.

For example, with pedophilia, if we insist that nobody can be forced to do anyhting unless they have consented to it, and that children cannot give consent because of their age, and therefore parents are entitled to decide what activities children embrace then we can prevent the pedophiles from winning the argument.

That is also why I am afraid I don't agree with you on homosexuality, they are adults, they consent to it, it is none of our business what they do.

By the same token, you have every right to teach your children you think this is wrong behavior. As well as to voice your opinion publicly.

I just think that if we start going down the road of denying people have these rights we end up with relativism, in fact human rights are often attacked by relativists who accuse them of being Western imperialist impositions!

And without them in the end with would finish up with despotism. People disagree on these issues, and without basic rules that protect individuals we would end up with the strongest ones winning out and imposing their views on everybody else. And the strongest ones may be very bad indeed.

Of course this system of personal freedoms means we all have to live with things we consider wrong. That's difficult. But I am just afraid that without them we would be even worse off.

You know what people say, democracy is a very bad system of government but it is also the best we have!

Leigh,

I am sorry, you are right, I should have said. The philosopher in question is Avishai Margalit. I didn't think it mattered but maybe it was rude to omit it.

As for your post, I am not sure exactly what we disagree on, because at one point you do say that you already know people should not be treated in certain ways. Which is pretty much what I was trying to say, too, that is there are certain ways it is wrong to treat people, I presume simply because they are people. Which is the doctrine at the basis of human rights.

Maybe the disagreement then is that you think people who fail to respect rights forfait their own rights and therefore we are then allowed to treat them in ways that we otherwise wouldn't. But then I have said I agree with that, too. Of course I think you should not treat me the way you would treat Saddam Hussein, he is a criminal, I am not. He will go to prison, I won't.

So maybe the disagreement is one of degrees, that is, maybe you think we have no duty to respect any of Saddam Hussein's rights at all. So that we could torture, kill, humiliate him as well. That's where I would disagree. I think we still owe it, not to him personally, but to his and our own humanity to refrain form excess.

And this is because I think nobody should be tortured, and this is precisely the rule that Saddam has violated. It only reinforces the wrongness of his behavior to say that even though he has done it himself we will not do it to him, because we believe in the wrongness of these acts, because we can see right from wrong.

And this is less than what the Bible itself requires, turn the other cheeck?

Oh, I'm so sorry, but this fails at so many levels. I don't want to rain on anyone's parade here, but the value system of the many and various Australian cultures is not 'the liberal political system'--and the logic that the authors have used to derive this equation is beyond me. I wish Ausralia did value 'liberalism' over everything else, because I'd love to live in such a fairy-land utopia (I think...).

What they've described is simply not a model of how society works - from what I understand of the reasoning, they are suggesting that the only thing that the various Australian cultures have in common are the values of 'liberal politics', that therefore 'liberalism' isn't just the most important Australian value, but is the only Australian value.

'Australian' values are those which are conjured when each individual thinks of themselves as Australian -- and for some people they may well include things like 'not slanty-eyed', or 'not Islamic'. And if enough of them believe that and convince enough others, then that intolerance becomes the dominant culture. There's some evidence that infact Howard has managed to rewrite Australian culture to give permission to that intolerance, which has therefore become stronger (no longer is being racist something that people are ashamed of).

But then, I guess I can see what the authors are attempting. It is true that it is possible to influence opinions by pointing out cultural inconsistencies - like the clash between the belief in human rights (which stems from the Judeo-Christian belief system), and the belief that all migrants must accept 'our' values if they are to become citizens. But this paper doesn't quite do the trick.

Sorry. On your side, guys, really.

Moonie,

well, of course not all Australians are liberals, if they were we wouldn't be having these discussions at all, would we? but isn't it undeniable that Australia is a liberal democracy? that is, that our poliitcal system is a liberal political system therefore we do share that don't we? so the point is, I think, if we claim that Australia is a liberal democracy then we ought to behave in a certain way, and not that everybody agrees with liberalism

and just a small point, it is true that Christianity has a universalist ehtos and therefore is in a way partly why a belief in human rights evolved, but we should not overplay this, a lot of traditions have influenced this development. And a lot of what went into human rights was secular in nature.

An let's not forget that liberalism as a philosphy partly developped as a way of dealing with warrying factions of Christians in Europe...

arjay your statement is the most sober of all these articles. what exactly is it that makes the do-gooders (who are 95 % academic background) fail to see what is happening. when i converse with ordinary revenue contributing people, 95% of them can see where we are heading. education in australia derailed during and after the whitlam years and has given us the situation we're finding ourselves in now. we can only hope that we will soon have some sort of national service (not military service) so that the saturation educated actually get some exposure to reality.