Lots of good answers here, but one I haven’t seen is that some people have different value systems. They would be the ones that say “yes, human rights would be nice, but at what cost?”

Typically, as everyone here has pointed out, they value their own well being and comfort. “We can’t end child slave labor because then a KitKat would cost $20.” They might cite economic priorities, national or personal security, religious beliefs, or civic pride (see: China).

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I doubt anyone you are talking to is opposed to all human rights, that sounds very much like a straw man statement. Reasonable people can disagree about whether any particular right should be protected by law.

The reason is simple: any legally-protected right you have stands in direct opposition to some other right that I could have:

• Your right to free speech is necessarily limited by my right to, among other things, freedom from slander/libel, right to a fair trial, right to free and fair elections, right to not be defrauded, etc.
• Your right to bodily autonomy can conflict with my right to health and safety when there is a global pandemic spreading and you refuse vaccination.
• Your property rights are curtailed by rules against environmental harm, discrimination, insider trading, etc.

No right is ever meant to be or can be absolute, and not all good government policy is based on rights. Turning a policy argument into one about human rights is not generally going to win the other person over, it’s akin to calling someone a racist because of their position on affirmative action. There’s no rational discussion that can be had after that point.

Misunderstanding. For example it’s embarrassing how long I opposed feminism because I only read extreme scare stories about it, never realizing how much of what I took for granted in relationships between genders was a hard fought victory for feminism and all of us. Then when we had our first child, who were the only people standing up to say my company should have paternity leave? Feminists.

I have a more conservative brother who is very much against affirmative action. However he sees firsthand the results of blindly promoting people to meet diversity goals without regard to ability. Meanwhile I’ve been at companies who pay attention to both, resulting in a much more successful workplace

Or are we going political? Clearly the Palestinian situation is a crime against humanity, but do I oppose human rights by saying that is much more complex and it’s not as simple as Israel just stopping?

Part of it is disagreement over what should be a right. I have genuinely met people that belive rights like protest, movment, voting, legal rep, should not given they must be earned. So they are pro rights just a very limited list.

Example say “health care is a right” in the usa.

Some people live in dangerous places and believe that treating criminals like human beings is the same as ignoring their crimes. These people believe that human rights should only be for those who deserve it by not harming the “good citizen”.

I guess because they think they are superior and forget that human rights include their own rights.

So yea, the “because they’re stupid” answer sums it up nicely.

Normally, to be honest, it’s because they want to hurt someone. Look at the Conservatives in the UK, who are desperate to repeal human rights legislation so that they can send refugees to Rwanda without right of appeal.

Note that those Conservatives still think that they have human rights. Their excuse for depriving refugees of human rights is that some of them have entered the country illegally. Yet, none of them thinks any Conservative MP should be detained arbitrarily or deported, even though they now acknowledge that they, their government and their party have broken the law in various ways. No, they want to strip rights from other people. Their argument doesn’t wash.

Slavery (as an abstract, not necessarily racially motivated) has A LOT of benefits for the owning class.

I’m also vehemently opposed to any and all of it’s forms, just fyi.

The ownerclass benefits from people not having protections. I don’t think you can put it any simpler than this. Slaves, child labour, debt cycles, prison labour, forced sex labour, all examples of none-existant or low protections.

There have always been such (it is human nature) - but right now they feel bold enough to speak and act, whereas previously they had been too afraid and embarrassed to do so publicly.

In South Carolina, various KKK-like groups said in advance that they wanted to kill people, wrapped barbed wire around baseball bats (in order to better kill people with), showed up to kill people, then actually killed people, then bragged about having killed people… Oh right, but the other side was not successful in securing a permit for their peaceful protest, so you know, there are “many sides” to every issue I guess.

Misinformation/brainwashing techniques are powerful. Like if you believed that a particular type of human was the root of all evil in this world, then you SHOULD want them dead, under those circumstances… right? You do not bc you know better, not just about that one group but more fundamentally that it is ideas that bring about evil, not people. But the people killing people do not know that, and it is to the advantage of others who seek power, and want to use the army of sheeple to advance their own agenda, for those sheeple to not know that either.

Some people define things differently than reality has ascribed, what are rights, while others are just cruel.

Ever wonder why ghosts keep up with modern language trends?

Theres a lot of different ideas of what human rights should be. Abortion is the easiest example. Its a human right to abort, which to some is murder. In that case, it would make sense to be against to be against human rights, if you believe that right is to murder.

In what context did this happen?

I had this experience a short while back, and it really shook me. Granted, this was on the Internet, where people are more willing to say wild things or generally go mask-off, but I was downright flabbergasted. I’ll try to summarize the various arguments without inserting my own bias:

• because they view human rights as a social or legal concept, and not inherently more important than other social or legal principles

• because we as humans haven’t historically respected them, and don’t respect them universally even now, so demanding respect for human rights is a form of privilege

• because the idea of human rights requires a belief that humans have special dignity above that of other creatures (this one I found especially irksome, because I found the arguments denigrating to animal rights)

• because various groups advocating for human rights don’t agree on what those rights are, so blanket support for human rights is not something they can do

I’ll try to find the reddit post where this took place if I can. It was… it was something. If I’ve misrepresented any of the arguments above, it was not intentional but only because I find them so alien that I cannot understand them properly.