logicallypositive:

I don’t understand how some people can rip on the concept of natural rights on one hand (and rightfully so; natural rights are a stupid idea if you ask me) but when you apply that same logic to the concept of human rights, then all of a sudden it’s a different story?

Rights is rights is rights.

LTMC: Agreed in part.  The problem with “natural rights” is that it implies that they exist in the state of nature, prior to an act of convention between moral agents.  The only reason why a right so conceived would be ever be respected in-fact within the state of nature is through such a convention; i.e. a mutual agreement to recognize that such right exists, and to abstain from violations thereof, usually on the basis that it is mutually beneficial to everyone.  In doing so, the inhabitants elevate some aspect of existence as superior to other human concerns.  This can have a powerful effect on how humans relate to one another.  But it can hardly be said to be “natural” in any sense, because it exists by convention, and not by virtue of existing per se.

In this sense, it is correct to observe that human rights, like any right, are premised not on a violation of a pre-existing moral order, but on the violation of a social compact in which the participants of society agree that some aspect of human existence/experience has a great deal of value, and therefore ought to be respected as superior to other concerns.  If we agree, for example, that ethnic cleansing is a “human rights” violation, then the gravamen of the right, and its very nature as something we call a “right,” comes not from any fundamental nature, but from the force of our collective disapproval for the act in question.  That disapproval, of course, has some independent logic (e.g. “nobody likes being ethnically cleansed, and I wouldn’t want it to happen to me or anyone I care about.”).  The appeal to human rights is therefore an appeal to the logic of a mutually beneficial convention based on well-recognized aspects of the human experience.  Appealing to that logic is not necessarily less compelling than appealing to a “natural” right.  The latter is just an easy short-cut, if for no other reason than it often carries a wiff of divinity.

Indeed, most modern, successful societies do premise their existence on the existence of some body of divinely-granted (ergo natural) rights.  Of course, those rights only have life to the extent that the founding documents and procedures of that society lend them any material support.  A right that exists only in theory but not in practice is no right at all.  So we’re back to convention.  Every time.