Excluding animals from rights rests on an arbitrary active-rights premise

Evidence

The Mexican delegate’s optimism seems to challenge the oft-heard critique of the abstraction of human rights discourse, its indifference to the particularity that it is the stuff of lived experience. On the contrary, it seemed to be precisely because the universal human inscribed in the texts of human rights is abstract that it has proved so capable of expanding to include those who were once excluded. From this perspective, both the subjects and borders of rights are structurally in flux, and so the language of human rights can always be taken up by new excluded subjects to affirm their inclusion in the category of humanity. Such a strategy – what the French philosopher Jacques Rancière calls ‘verifying equality’ – entails seizing and taking seriously what is often dismissed as a groundless claim (that all human beings are born free and equal in rights, for instance) and using it to stage a dispute. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 228 (#complicates, via linked claim)

The either/or of civil liberties versus national security is a dangerous one. It produces an ideology that it is OK to sacrifice the rights of some people over others. This way of thinking has led to some of the worst human rights abuses in history, including the internment of Japanese Americans. — Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, 487 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Animal rights advocacy still depends on humanlike qualification criteria; Denying settlement rights constitutes moral exclusion in plain view — Cristian Tileagă, The Nature of Prejudice: Society,…, 613; The liberties-versus-security binary justifies sacrificing out-group rights — Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, 487 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• The abstract universality of rights discourse enables its expansion to excluded groups #complicates (0.76) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 228
• The liberties-versus-security binary justifies sacrificing out-group rights #complicates (0.74) — Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, 487