"R" is for Ridiculous Arguments

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Jeremy Bentham's Attack on Natural Rights > .

Action on climate would be good for most, if not all, inhabitants of the globe, BUT ... the young are increasingly insufferable. Where, in what nation's constitution is "action on climate change" entrenched as a "human right"?

Easy. 

Nowhere.

Six entitled narcissists are suing 32 EU-member-state governments because the precious snowflakes identify themselves as the victims of trampling of what they assume to be their "human rights".

Clearly, not only do they appear to be unaware:
a) of the technical and economic obstacles to rapidly cutting CO2 emissions, or
b) that, (iirc), China (2020) is responsible for ~31% of global emissions of CO2, and the USA (2020) for ~13%,
but c) they clearly have no notion of the necessarily-legislated underpinnings of the "rights" that civilians actually can call upon.

Still, if declaring that I have a human right suffices, then I'll soon be claiming that some entity or organization owes me a billion dollars so that I might live the life of luxury to which, as a human right, I suddenly feel entitled.

The English utilitarian political philosopher and lawyer Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) dismissed the notion of “natural” rights as nonsense and argued the all rights were the creation of the state:

Rights are, then, the fruits of the law, and of the law alone. There are no rights without law—no rights contrary to the law—no rights anterior to the law. Before the existence of laws there may be reasons for wishing that there were laws—and doubtless such reasons cannot be wanting, and those of the strongest kind;—but a reason for wishing that we possessed a right, does not constitute a right. To confound the existence of a reason for wishing that we possessed a right, with the existence of the right itself, is to confound the existence of a want with the means of relieving it. It is the same as if one should say, everybody is subject to hunger, therefore everybody has something to eat.

Jeremy Bentham famously regarded natural rights as “simple nonsense” and imprescriptible natural rights as “nonsense on stilts” (see his attack on the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen in Anarchical Fallacies (1796)). Thirty five years later he was still railing against the idea. In an unpublished work on Pannomial Fragments (c. 1831) he gave the clearest statement of his position: that rights were nothing but the creation of “the functionaries of government in the supreme grade” who granted them to citizens and which rights were guaranteed by “the functionaries of judicature” and enforced by “the functionaries belonging to the army”. Bentham thought that the idea of “natural rights” was a “fiction” which had been invented by revolutionaries in order to show “the nullity of real laws” which were “the fruits of the law, and of the law alone”. If the believers in natural rights had their way, he argued, it would lead to “anarchy.” The Works of Jeremy Bentham, vol. 3.