• Welcome! The TrekBBS is the number one place to chat about Star Trek with like-minded fans.
    If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Human Rights, The Very Name IS Racist

How about the simple terms, peoples rights
But then you run into situations like in ensigns of command, where you have a sentient species that doesn't consider another sentient species to be "people."

And what do you do when a species is on the knife's edge between sentient and just an animal?
 
^^this

Civil rights are for all sentient species. "Human rights" refers to one species and is easily spoken with well-meaning but clearly led to unintentional misinterpretation and it spiraled from there, in the way the story needed to.
Civil rights also has a problem, in that 'civilisation' was often used as a justification for mistreating the 'uncivilised'.
And as pointed out in another thread, sentient is also problematical. My dog is definitely sentient, but...
 
I'm hitting the same problem with a fiction piece I'm writing in which "human trafficking" is involved. I think I'll have a non-human character mention the discrepancy and come up with some silly BS explanation.
 
The universal translator always translates the phrase as human rights, so that's what we hear.
 
The reality of etymology is that you don’t know what things would be called in the distant future because they would likely grow out of some common usage along the way. The Tzars of Russia drew that name from Caesars of Rome, who took their name from a bloke who also lent it to salads and a particular form of birth. Maybe in the universal dialect all species are humans in how they refer to themselves, rather than being humans from earth. Or that’s just the shorthand for a particular type of rights, because they were best codified and exported from earth; the way we today might refer to our legal systems being Greco-Roman in origin in much of the west or the way we refer to Republics today, which is much removed from the original and has more to do with the French Revolution.

So maybe it’s cool that “human rights” became the accepted term. Star Trek is pretty human centric after all, because those writing it are humans, but for an in universe explanation people also tend to contextualise stories to their own national understanding. Chinese people and American people learn about history and various concepts through very different lenses. Heck, people from Cornwall and people from Glasgow....
 
Human rights isn’t a racist term. It’s just post modern PC sensitivity. Take the term indigenous rights: it doesn’t insinuate that other don’t have rights but it’s addressing the rights of indigenous people. In terms of the alien races of Star Trek, it’s not valid for them to be governed by human rights except under the governing of the Federation but realistically there are no cross cultural universal rights unless you find ethical aspects common to everyone.
 
In America we tend to just think of rights as..well...rights. But I don't think, civil or universal rights works. I tend to think more along the lines of the Romans where you had three classes of rights, natural, human, and civil. Natural rights being rights that come from the observation of nature. Human rights are those that are commonly recognized among that nations. And civil right are more like privileged bestowed by the government.

So which type of rights are we talking about when the Star Trek characters say "human rights"?
 
I'm not sure the Federation would agree with your description of "civil rights" there. The rhetoric around such rights is that they aren't given by the government; rather, some governments unjustly intrude upon them, while others do not.

Although in purely pragmatic terms, all rights are civil rights. What makes something a "right" is that a particular legal system recognizes it as such.
 
If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Sign up / Register


Back
Top