 All right my astute and trepid learners, before we get started talking about human rights we're going to dive back into some territory that a lot of people don't discuss when first learning about human rights and We're doing this because we trust that our students really want to know these things in a much deeper way And so we're starting at the very beginning and to start at the very beginning in the Conversation about human rights. We might first want to go all the way back to Two core concepts, and that's all we're going to talk about in this lesson. We're going to talk about law and What it means? What is law and we're going to talk about rights? We're going to talk about these things in some very interesting ways First let's start with law so Law is traditionally divided up into two categories if we take a look at sort of the Western tradition Generally, you see it divided up into what's called natural law and then on the other end Sometimes you're about something called positive law Now these things are not diametrically opposed. There's not some big wall between them. They're kind of like I don't know when we were talking about this maybe the difference between salty and sweet so sometimes there is space in the middle where they meet and Basically when you think about law Thinking about the way that we structure our work societies and the way that we decide what's right and wrong We often do this according to sort of at a more base level like at the very very simplest level we do this according to natural law and This idea like so the justifications or the reasons why we feel this are often attributed back to nature some sort of God or gods and reason And the Western tradition there's usually not an ass at the end of gods but in others that there would be and This reason point right here is actually quite interesting because this is more of a recent development really Now if you look at positive law It's just a very different definition all together. What we're talking about here are man-made laws So this means humans have decided that this law needs to exist and That it has it has a context. It has a culture that it's living in a place and a time They are a social agreement So it's basically people in a society are looking around looking at each other and saying should there be a rule about this well Yes, so I'm gonna shorten that to social agreement and you can add the end in your own mind when you read that You also want to think of this as a control mechanism. So controlling our natural disposition so this is to say that Law positive law often sees sort of the faults of humans and says, okay What ways can we sort of avoid the typical pitfalls that we humans get ourselves into the typical problems? They're basically designed to regulate our actions in public or in social life So maybe an example of positive law might be voting in ancient Greece at that time Free men were allowed to vote which excluded women which excluded children which excluded slaves and by modern standards not giving those members of society a voice is considered pretty universally to be a very bad idea But at that time, I mean in the Western tradition It was considered one of the most progressive and democratic societies in history and at that time it was quite revolutionary Looking back on it. We've grown and adapted and changed and made new decisions so That also brings up a little bit that intersection right there of this controlling disposition and social agreement sort of bring up The idea of morality Morality is really interesting Moral being sort of your general feeling or your general sort of ethic sort of in a more sort of spiritual or philosophical kind of way and Here is where you kind of look at a sort of strange relationship between morality and Positive law because there's a little bit of a feedback loop here You can see that sometimes our moral ethics or our ideas about the way things should be and what it means to be You know Acceptable in the social sort of fit to social norms Sometimes is in one position and that changes over time and there's a little bit of a feedback loop here between What the moral standards of a time or society might be and what they might become over time? All right, so that is kind of an interesting Sort of look at what law is and when we talk about human rights later on you'll see that there's quite an interesting Conversation there's a little bit of something I would say I would I personally would just call it attention between these two things in a way and This is really important to forward move in here if you think about it challenging Challenging your ideas the ones that are based up here on God nature and reason and Creating then man-made social agreements that control disposition. So you want to think about What are these sort of values in a way this morality thing kind of Actually comes up to what your ideas of God are and what's your ideas of nature are and your understanding of those things and Then how you implement them in a way and this is kind of the positive laws kind of the Doing part of law in a way All right, so this structure is actually completely repeated within rights in a way. So over here Those we've got our first type of rights are natural rights surprise surprise and down here. It's not positive rights, but it is Legal rights, which are actually in a lot of ways very similar to this so legal rights outright Rights you can add rights and law to the end of both of these over here All right, so natural rights are derived from God Nature God and reason so you can just kind of copy this entire structure over here one more time and Then when you take a look at legal rights, it's very much the same thing. It's laws by people so again, it's the implementation of those rights and Again, it's that same tension This is the same sort of tension between what do we believe what is our view of the world say and How do we then enact that and create the legal rights that are understanding of natural rights or? natural things then Would lead to if we were to follow reason or morality So you can decide this based upon your view of God you can decide this based upon reason or you can decide this based upon your Understanding of nature, which is kind of in a way reason as well Now let's take a quick look at what rights actually are we've seen kind of their structure and that they resemble Law in a way we haven't actually said what is a right well a right is and I'm going to take the s off actually a right is Entitlement to either perform an action or not perform an action or to be in a certain state or not be in a certain state So maybe in a great example of this would be your right to say something because you are a human with a sort of Brain and an opinion you have the right to say what you think Well, people also have the right not to listen to you or to listen to you so in when you take a look at this sort of Example you'll see that there's actually something called a duty that is attached to that right You as the speaker who wants to speak your mind Other people have the duty to protect your right to do that And you have the duty of not forcing other people to listen to the thing that you have to say it is basically a system that sort of built on respect in a way and this very strong connection between Right and duty is actually going to play a very important role in this course All right, so one more concept that we're going to want to cover And that concept is positive and negative rights, so we're going to start with rights right here These are the same rights and as both of the rights that we talked about natural and legal rights But a different view upon them and different sort of Look at what they do. I'm going to start with negative rights up here And then look at positive rights over here. Sorry. My pen is being a little slow today All right, so let's start with negative rights. What does that mean? Well a negative right requires inaction. It's kind of a strange thing Do you think about it when I first heard of this concept when we were talking about it in our meeting yesterday? I was like wow, what does that mean inaction? Well, it basically means it's something like the example that we pulled was Freedom of speech. So when you have freedom of speech what's required of a government or society or an organization Is to not do anything when someone is expressing their right to say something that's on their mind or share an idea or a thought What's required of society and of the structures outside of that person is inaction Allow that person to speak allow them to have that enact on that right and then the other Type here is positive Positive rights require action, and that's how they're different From negative rights, so you'll notice that there is no in here. There is just the action part So basically a great example of this would be education Let's put education down here Why would education be a good example? Well in order to give people a Right like education you need to build big systems You need to create schools or you need to or maybe if you're taking a different approach You need to open access to those people and that requires a certain amount of work That's not something that's just naturally going to unfold your society has to make an Active decision to do that and then carry through on it. So I'm gonna write speech up here so you can see Difference Remember speech requires inaction so a negative right and a positive right requires action or something. Maybe like education All right, so I think that kind of gives you an idea of the basic introduction To rights as we talk about them now But one thing that I want to take you out with here, and this is a really really important point Is that all of this is a very Western construction? Very idea of rights is not Western But the way that we are discussing it in this course is going to be very Western because in a lot of ways the current Discussion around the world is it comes from a very Western tradition? Most of the people you quote most of the sort of intellectual ideas are born Or at least written down in the West maybe not necessarily born there because they're born everywhere So an example of another tradition that has this sort of similar concept is something called Dharma Dharma is something that comes from the Buddhist and Hindu tradition. So we're talking about Asia generally Although there are people from those religious backgrounds living all over the world today pretty much everywhere I think I spelled that wrong. I totally did Let's go back here. I think there's an age here Don't tell anyone. All right, Hindu Buddhist tradition and This has to do this idea of Dharma has to do with the natural order of things. So has to do with maybe your duty of vocation or religion a natural way that things should be and It also refers to law And so when we're talking about things like natural law in this course or in this human rights discussion We also want to remember that there are other traditions and maybe your tradition has a very different idea Maybe it's something like Dharma Maybe it is Dharma. Maybe you're a Hindu or a Buddhist And so we want to open the discussion up here at the end of this lesson to maybe talk about the relationship between this concept of You know a non-western idea like Dharma and Natural law so maybe in the comment area below you can maybe reflect on What sort of natural law might mean in your community or in your culture because every community and culture has some concept It's very similar. So we would like to hear what you have to say