In a very interesting lecture in Amsterdam, published on Youtube the fifteenth this month, the muslim academic and debater Muhammed Hijab said many interesting tings. He warned for a liberalism spread by sword. There has to be a dialog between East and West, discussing human rights. I agree. It is important that the different parts of the world are allowed to participate. But I think The United Nations is something else than The United States. I think common people all over the world have a lot to win just because those human rights function as some kind of axiom.
Muhammad Hijab has of course a point when he emphasies that we are not borne equal. We do not live in equally big houses. Our conditions are very different. But that is not the same as view people as equal. The charters on human rights consider the individuals as equal, as do the underpinning liberal philosophy (in the wide sense used by Muhammad Hijab).
It is necessary to give argument for a philosophical position. The mathematician who sets it as his task to give a mathematical proof some times uses a proof called counterproof. He then proves the opposite to what he has in his mind to state as a true mathematical proposition. We can do the same in moral and political philosophy.
What should have been the consequences of humans living together without a society, i. e. without rules governing their actions? Hobbes gave an answer, Rousseau another. The fight was what Hobbes considered should have happened in what he called a State of Nature. To give the power to one sovereign would solve the conflict and make some peaceful progress possible. Hobbes is important for the contractual idea but he has been looked upon as some kind of defender of an antiliberal absolute society. Rousseau is in the same leage but for the opposite position. The State of Nature was a golden age. He is hardly a liberal philosopher in a true sense.
The State of Nature is a hypothesis regarding what is counter to the experienced history of human societies. It is important. It can be wieved as fiction but in the same meaning a mathematical proof assuming something that is not the fact is fiction. An important argumentative possibility in a philosophical discourse, I will say. It is a bit surprising that Muhammad Hijab failes to realise this. He is a clever debater that strengthens the believes not just in muslims in a stricter sense but in other believers as well.
