I believe that if humanity has lasted for so long and has grown and developed so much, it is because we have implemented human rights. Human rights are now the basis of our society, but they should not be taken for granted, and neither do the right to healthcare or adequate food.
In many ways, we (the western world) have tried to push aside Darwin’s theory of the survival of the fittest, we have tried to build a world in which disabilities are no longer a hindrance to living a normal life. Killing, inflicting torture and inhuman treatments, raping, stealing, enslaving: we know these things are wrong, it is deep-rooted in our society that these actions result (most times) in punishments. And we believe it is normal.
But we have to take in consideration that it has not always been that way, and that the animal world, which we used to be a part of, are living under completely different rules: they simply don’t have any.
A picture of a cat playing with a mouse: in our world, this would be considered as torture. Two thousand years ago, it could have been normal.
The human world used to be as ruthless as today’s animal world, but we have developed into an evolved, better, fairer world. But this is infinite. Rights are fluctuating all the time as we discover new things, make scientific progresses: soon, there might be a world in which abortion (arguments for that here), gay marriage, gay adoption, IVF, or even divorce, are human rights everywhere around the world. And after that, it could be cloning, being able to choose the sex of a baby or its physical appearance…all this sounds completely crazy now, but two hundred years ago, nobody would have believed that women could have the right to vote, and four hundred years ago, nobody thought slavery could ever come to an end.
The European Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine, in its first article of the 1998 Additional Protocol on the Prohibition of Cloning Human Beings states that “any intervention seeking to create a human being genetically identical to another human being, whether living or dead, is prohibited”. These prohibitions are based on “concern for human dignity and the moral status of the human embryo”. However, as a commentary on “Human Cloning and human rights” by Carmel Shalev says, these prohibitions constraint two other fundamental liberties: freedom of reproduction and freedom of science (you read this paper here).
The battle for different kinds of human rights: some believe women's rights are more fundamental than the rights of an embryo, whereas others believe an embryo is a human being and taking its life away is therefore breaking a human right.
Because they are not inherent to humanity, and because what makes a “good world” is something that is highly subjective according to one’s own beliefs, there is a constant battle occurring between what could be considered as human rights. Ultimately, adding rights to one lead to restricting another’s. Human rights should not be taken for granted; some are more set in stone than others, but we, as individuals, have to choose our own battles on where we want to stand, on which rights we believe are the most fundamental in order to build the society we want to see.
Super important points about the increasingly egalitarian sensitivity of human beings with respect to the abnegation of Darwin and the way things that seem inconceivable to us will inevitably become commonplace.