Thoughts on the United Nations' Declaration of Human Rights

1.     Unlike our Declaration of Independence, which grounds man's dignity and his natural rights in his position as a rational being made in God's image, this document assumes man's value and worth without grounding it in anything. Every society without Christian influence has enslaved and oppressed and thought that this was natural. If you are going to go completely against the grain of history, you have to ground your theory in something outside of history. Failing to do so makes the argument less persuasive.

2.     For every right there is a corresponding duty. For example, if you have the right to speech I have the duty, whether directly as an active citizen, or indirectly as passive citizen that pays taxes to soldiers and police officers, to support your right to speech even when support requires force against those that would seek to silence you. Some of these rights sound good (e.g. the right to employment), but if you have a right to employment, I have a duty to provide you with work. How are we going to do that? Likely by forcing another to give you a job, which will in turn violate his right to do what he sees fit with his property.

3.     Some of these are too vague to be of much use. I agree in a right to leisure (c.f. Article 24) because of the principle of the Sabbath, but how much leisure? And again, if you have a right to leisure, I have a duty to provide it, even though giving you paid leave violates my right to property (Article 17).

4.     I would say something like 80-90% of these rights are Biblical (e.g. the right to property, conscience, popular political involvement of a sort, fair trials, equality before the law—all of these are in the Law of Moses). I think the rest are generally wise, but to call them rights confuses things. For example, I think that all children should have basic education, but to call it a right takes the burden of education from the parents to the state, which may create worse problems than it cures. Likewise, I generally think freedom of movement between nations is good, but to enforce it you would need a superstate that would undoubtedly create more tyranny than our decentralized/anarchical system of modern nation-states creates.  

*Here is a link to the UN's Declaration of Human Rights: http://www.ohchr.org/EN/UDHR/Documents/UDHR_Translations/eng.pdf