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Advantages And Disadvantage Of Rights

Decent Essays

INTRODUCTION: AN UNDERSTANDING OF RIGHTS DISCOURSE AND THE NECESSARY SHIFT

Rights have numerous advantages: they accurately express issues, they attempt to address injustices gradually through politico-legal means, and add precision in the identification of inequality in various context. The purpose of individual rights in the broader rights narratives is to shift social consciousness, develop accessibility for popular issues, empower and drive self-determination for marginalised persons and communities. Rights contain social value, and are means for marginalised people to respond to violations of their rights as included assertive individuals, assigned their portion of the power dynamic in the broader political system. This essay posits that the equality that individual rights purport to promote is largely illusory and fail to provide real means to redress injustices under Western liberal democracies. I will argue that rights assigned through construction of the liberal social order are a false representations of the needs of the marginalized, failing to promote substantive equality in society. I concede that rights have value as social phenomena that can energize and inspire movements for equality. This, however, is insufficient to dictate the function of individual rights, as more accurately the alienating effect, the non-objective assignment of, and asymmetry of rights discourse do little to further equality and more to engage justiciability in courts.

II. A BRIEF

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