carnex said:
thaluikhain said:
What would you consider a privilege, then, if being favoured over someone else isn't one?
Something you have that isn't considered human right and yet you are entitled to.
For example, free contraceptives. It's lifestyle enhancement, isn't necessary for normal human functioning and yet people feel entitled to receive it for free. That is basic definition of privilege.
Given what happens in some places, I'd hesitate to call that a good example.
Free contraceptives are an incentive to make people less likely to do things that could seriously ruin their own lives, and generally make society a lot worse off...
The consequences for the individual and society of unexpected pregnancies and such are pretty high, and have an especially large negative effect on poor women. (you can see this with the typical situation in 3rd world countries, where a woman may end up with 10 children...)
That aside, a lot of contraceptives are handed out to help prevent the spread of STD's... Which is generally something that a society doesn't want to encourage spreading. This is as much a benefit to the people around you as it is to you personally... Medical care is expensive, and even in a society where you have to pay for it yourself, if you have a disease, you make it more likely others will get it too...
(This is in fact also a secondary argument for welfare payments, as long as those payments can keep public places mostly free of homeless people. )
Anyway, as to the OP, does it really matter?
Lots of things should be rights, but clearly aren't respected as such much of the time.
And privilege and disadvantage are really two sides of the same thing.
For someone to be at a disadvantage, inherently implies someone else has an advantage.
And in some cases, there is an argument to be made that the system is deliberately designed to maintain those biases.
Slavery isn't fair to the slaves, but it gained quite a bit for the slave owners that had nothing to do with rights... And were certainly things they didn't really deserve.
Wealth... Seems to carry power out of all proportion to what a person deserves.
Sure, you might say "I worked hard to become wealthy". But note that even if that is true, your wealth, no matter how you earned it, also earns you a huge amount of undeserved influence, and can let you easily do things a poorer person would struggle to, or let you get away with things a poorer person probably wouldn't.
That influence can hardly be called a 'right' it is merely a side-effect of the wealth... And it seems at least in part that certain wealthy people have gradually been using their disproportionate influence to change both the culture and governments that benefits the wealthy at the expense of the poor.
That this is even possible speaks of the privilege wealth brings, because in a democracy, it is completely out of proportion to the influence any one person has an innate right to have.
The power balance between men and women that used to exist (the present situation is much less clear), meant a woman basically had very few rights, and the system forced them to be dependent on a male to get by. They had no choice in this. Now, sure, that's a disadvantage to women, but this system seemed to be deliberately enforced largely to benefit men.
Deliberately fighting to keep another group at a disadvantage can hardly suggest what you have going on is a 'right'. Not to mention that if balancing out this disadvantage would require making your situation slightly worse than it was, can it be argued that you had the right to keep the same advantage you always did? (Even though that's impossible to maintain without intentionally creating a disadvantage for another group)
Could it not be argued that the rights you have above and beyond what you could expect to have if no-one else was at a disadvantaged compared to you, are in fact, privileges?
A benefit you can only have due to someone else not having it can hardly be called a right, after all...
Anyway, this is starting to give me a headache... I hate topics like this, to be quite honest...