Wednesday, April 1, 2009

these last chapters are awesome

What I found most interesting is this idea of an export of rights and legal systems with zero imports. It seems pretty obvious that this is our behavior and we take great pride in it most of the time(at least as a group it seems that way). This seemed obvious enough that it was not all that troubling because both cases are pounded into our heads when we are little. Today I was watching a little fox news and someone was saying how america is the best most free nation that god ever gave man and this reading made me think about that as a view point. We seem to believe that no nation on earth could possibly have anything to give to us in the way of rights talk yet we take great pride in making sure we are read and looked to throughout the world. Yet what is interesting is that other nations that look at the American constitution and Supreme Court are not walking down the same path we are they are taking what they find to be good and moving on.
The way in which we talk about rights here is an issue because the farther down the path that we are on we continue to stray from the reason we have rights. Glendon points out that we have left behind our reasons for rights and started to push into egoist desires as our reason for rights. We continually throw out rules and obligations by asserting rights never really thinking about whether we have such a right or even ought to have such a right.
My question is framed a little personally my internship this summer is working with a humna rights group in Israel/palestine and the group has told me that "we work on the people demanding their rights and not us supplying it to them." In light of this book how ought a process like this be undertaken, in a place where rights talk has for the most part been left on the side and is not yet a cultural thing like it is in America and Europe and some other places?

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