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Are Rights Still Right?

Janet Dawn Abines

It is known that rights are everchanging. Rights that may apply years ago might not
apply in today’s society. More rights must be required and implemented with the fast
paced rise of technology and society. These are some rights illustrated by different
authors suggest would help improve today’s society.

The right to be a person, not a thing

Time and time again, women are being told that their bodies are things, and have no
human rights.

In Ohio United States of America, the Republicans have recently moved to declare
motherhood mandatory and also to define any fertilized egg, whether in a woman’s
body or in a Petri dish – a person which institutes that destruction of such entity would
lead to murder or manslaughter. However, Libertarians demand that the rights of an
individual must be respected, women being treated as children is respect to rights. In
today’s modern age, children might even have more rights.

Another idea given out by a Republican is that women cannot have been raped, since a
woman’s body “shuts that whole thing down.” He assumes that the body of a woman
automatically shuts down on its own. There is also a proposal that might declare women
persons from the neck up, but things from the neck down and can be requisitioned like
parcels of land. They suggest that the head would be a she and the body an it. And if
anyone chooses to question it, the anti-squawking legislation should take care of it.

In this case, it’s just the same as proposing that if you don’t want to give birth to child,
you may just get a head transplant to a body that cannot be able to give birth. This is
not right, of course. However, some states would still continue to remain blindsided that
women are humans and deserve to be treated the same.
The right to an inhabitable planet
There is no consideration of the Earth in the original Declaration of Human Rights. In
the earlier days, before the rise of technology and advanced mechanisms, it is
understandable that the “environment” is not considered. But, times have changed, the
human raced have become very good at storing food and fighting germs, the world wars
have become unthinkable because of how terrified we are, we need to focus on what
humans could do to each other, for better and for worse.

Although all the concerns in the universal declaration like intolerance, poverty, ill health,
the lack of education, suffrage, still remain acute as ever, they are joined by an
unspoken dread. We have become what we can do for the Earth and how much
damage it can do to us.

The “environmentalism” movement have started in the early 1960s. There is no deny
that war, hunger, or unemployment exert tenuous claim on power, the leaders continue
to pretend that we cannot damage the ear. It is because the people with wealth and
power are the same people who can do most damage to the Earth. One of the biggest
force insisting Climate change isn’t real is the oil industry. Industries insist that they are
only meeting the human needs for housing, energy and dinner.

And so it is necessary to add in the Human Rights Declaration that humans must be
protected against those forces that would damage the Earth’s systems. If we mistreat
each other it will result to wars, etc., but humans are able to forgive and change.
However, if we mistreat the Earth for another several years, only science can predict
what will happen next.

The right to live free from blame

The right to live free from blame revels on the idea that there is always an entity that
makes a man feel small or not important. The right to live free from man’s feelings of
inadequacy if they do not achieve or have a sense of fulfilment such as winning or being
the best at something. It is a right to free yourself from any thought or person who you
think has a hold on you. In most cases, it focuses on rights women must have not to be
dependent on men. Men have always been dominant, everything we do as women must
always depend on how the man feels or what we think we must provide for the man.

This right however, emphasizes the individuality of a woman. We should not be required
to do something we do not want to just because we feel bad for the man we are with.
Also, we do not need to tolerate the fact that they will have claim on our ideas, thinking
they are his. Women should not be compared to other women, no matter how lovely.
We should not have to take blame for their childhood traumas, it is not our fault. We
must have the right to stand up for ourselves. A right to want what we want because
when a woman gets a little, she gets blamed. We have the right to blame them, also.

There must also be the right to love a good man, and to love the goodness in men. The
right to desire, because it’s not only a man’s mind that is free.

The right to understand

Six years before the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was proclaimed, the
science fiction of writer Isaac Asimov proposed his famous Three Laws of Robotics, that
a robot must not harm or through inaction, allow harm to come to any human being, that
it must obey orders given to it by human beings where they do not contradict the first
law, and that it must protect its own existence to the extent doing so would not conflict
with the first two laws. They are good laws but it is very different from the present
sophisticated and obscure technologies we live among today.

If the robots are being programed to do many things that we leave to them, an updated
change to Asimov’s law will require these robots to explain themselves to humans so
that we know that they are not actually being harmed because we actually have no idea
what they’re doing. But really, it’s on us, not on them.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was primarily concerned with interpersonal
relations and mutual understanding. Today we hear a lot about the benefits about the
latest technology like artificial intelligence and mass automation but even those tasked
to program them have little understanding of its effects on our societies. Lack of
understanding leads to fear, apathy and rage. The technological acceleration and
complexity lead to these emotions.

The industry programing these technologies must be transparent and actively work to
make them comprehensible and accountable. Only through mass understanding,
engagement, we hope to get a firmer grip on an increasingly strange world.

I don’t necessarily agree they should be transparent because first, they have
competitors or hackers that may interfere in their systems. Second, I don’t think the
mass really wants to know how to make them. I don’t think the people don’t have the
time.

The right to live free from discrimination

The biggest threat to human potential is the drastic racial disparities. Discrimination
places a limit on what a person can be and how far they go. It limits individual lives,
marginalizes talent and hinders society.

It’s so sad to think that parents have to warn children about school and employment and
that they’ll have to work harder in order to benefit the same reward. The same child can
never look up to becoming a leader becomes most leaders don’t look like them or
cannot relate to them.

Achieving great things is different for every individual. Not everyone wants to be a
leader but society shouldn’t try to hold you back if you want to lead. It shouldn’t tell you
you’re too much of something in order to hinder you from doing what you want and
becoming what you want to become.
Every person deserves to be treated equality in all aspects in life. You deserve to live
life without being limited by unnecessary racism. There should be no burden on a
person with color to live in a reality of discrimination but are not able to talk about it in
order to keep the peace.

This doesn’t only apply to people of color but as well as immigrants and refugees who
are threatened to be sent back to danger.

Being white shouldn’t be a pass to be able to do bad things and the fact that you are not
white does not indicate a tendency to do bad things.

A society where the life-limiting aspects are eliminated should be the goal. No matter
what race, gender or class, no one is held back.

The right not to work

It is a constitutional right that we can all claim the right to work. This also gives people
the right to work under decent conditions, protected from all the adverse consequences
of losing both wages and a sense of human purpose. Along with these provisions is the
right to limits on work.

The right to work is meaningless in the absence of a right to a life beyond work. Despite
this knowledge, workforce from most of the countries like China and Bangladesh, and
even for bankers and lawyers, the right to a non-working life has been annulled by the
sovereignty of work.

The right to non-work is overlooked. Psychology and culture should be of the same
importance as politics and economics. It is rooted in a deeply in human beings as
creatures whose substance and meaning lie in their work. The declaration, in defining
the right to non-work in terms of “rest and leisure” should imply for the purpose to
restore ourselves for work.
The importance of work is clearly discussed and how work defines a person and
claiming that non-work is a negative state in which one does not work. Non-work should
not be tainted in a bad light.

If non-productive, aimless time and space is protected as a basic human right, it

becomes a bit more difficult for massive corporations to insist in overworking their
employees. A non-working right is a right to poetry, a right to philosophy, and a right to
life. There’s more to life than work after all.

The right to define yourself

According to Magnus Hirschfeld, the number of actual and imaginable sexual varieties
is almost endless. He continues to explain that in each person has a different mixture of
manly and womanly substances, and there cannot be or hardly any person with the
same about of womanly and manly characteristics.

Sexual desire and gender identity are the base of bodily experience and it shouldn’t be
the basis of right and wrong. The 1948 Declaration of Human Rights safeguards the
right to a nation and the right to be safe from imprisonment but not the right to express
one’s own personal experience of gender. It’s unbelievable that we hinder someone
from expressing themselves almost forcing them to imprison themselves in their own
bodies.

What’s worse is that people are actually beaten and some lead to their death. His
excuse was that he didn’t want to be fooled by the transgender woman.

The right to transition, to shift, to exceed or refuse the expectations and constraints that
have attached to the categories of man and woman. The right to love whoever one
chooses and the right to be different, neither, or both. Everyone should be able to
choose the gender they identify with the most.

The right to a life offline

Framers of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights could not have foreseen that we
would have two sets of rights – one for our lives in the physical world, and one for our
lives online. But we don’t actually need to amend, what’s important is that we recognize
the same rights we expect in the physical world should also be applied to the online
world.

One of the pressing issues about the internet is that people expect everything to be
free. People download music online for free, not wanting to pay .99 dollars, leaving
artists and creators no longer earning from their work.

Scientific studies have proved that every additional hour we spend in front of screens
makes us less happy and less healthy. So we must put the brakes on moving every last
element of our lives into the digital realm. We must ensure that humans can live offline
as much as humanly possible.

We have laws in the physical world that do not apply online. We emphasize the
importance of security, order, morality and general welfare in a democratic society. This
is not adequately addressed in the digital world. It’s every person for himself.

Scientific studies have proved that every additional hour we spend in front of screens
make us less happy and less healthy. The world is fast paced now, especially the digital
world. We must be able to take a break from that. It is important to live a normal life
outside the online world.

Conclusion
Most of the suggestions by the authors are agreeable. Most of the lawmakers focus on
issues without really knowing a deeper root as to the problem. Most of the issues
addressed in the declaration have evolved and more measures should be applied to
address new issues. It’s best that as the world around us evolve, as society evolve, so
much the laws that protect the rights of the individuals of society.