Did Pluto only exist once we discovered it, or did it exist prior to its discovery? Human rights are the same. Enlightenment philosophers like Locke discovered human rights. They did not invent them.
Rules for social behavior can only ever be a human invention. There is no objective law of the Universe that says "torture is evil." The Universe doesn't care. Only
people care, only
we give moral meaning to the Universe, not the other way around, and so
we are the ones who decide what rights we have by common agreement.
Secondly, how does a society take away human rights?
A society that pretends human rights don't exist looks curiously identical to a world where human rights don't exist. The Nazis decided that human rights were not universal...and the only thing that stopped them in the end was military force from others who disagreed.
That would seem to suggest that human rights only exist as long as we choose to keep them.
We always have them. What the agreement allows for is a State that protects those rights.
Why? Because you
say so?
A foreign power or tyrant could only violate our human rights, not take them away.
Only from the perspective of an idealist who for some irrational reason believes that morality is objective.
Taq, morality (and thus human rights) can only ever be subjective, because it can only ever exist in the minds of people. Guidelines for interpersonal behavior are not written in stone, nor are they numbered among the laws of physics alongside gravity.
Moral conclusions like human rights only
appear to be self-evident when sufficient people have a sufficiently similar ethical goal system. If we all believe that morality is guided by human empathy, then
yes, we'll tend to wind up with nearly identical conclusions, and if enough of us think that way then such conclusions will
appear to be self-evident.
But if a person believes that morality is dictated by an authority figure, for an example, that person can wind up with entirely different moral conclusions and thus believe something entirely different about human rights.
We can probably agree on which point of view creates a
better society, but that doesn't mean that our moral conclusions are somehow objectively true.
Rights only exist in the human mind. Just like all other aspects of morality.
The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it.
- Francis Bacon
"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - John Rogers
A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity. — Albert Camus
"...the pious hope that by combining numerous little turds of
variously tainted data, one can obtain a valuable result; but in fact, the
outcome is merely a larger than average pile of shit." Barash, David 1995.