Legal positivism and logical positivism are distinct philosophical positions, and it's important to understand their respective claims separately.
Legal Positivism: Legal positivism is a school of thought within the philosophy of law that focuses on the separation of law and morality. According to legal positivists, the validity of law is determined by its sources, rather than its moral content. They argue that laws are social constructs created by human authorities and are binding as long as they conform to certain procedural requirements.
Legal positivism does not claim that laws are inherently just or morally correct, but rather that their legitimacy derives from their enactment through recognized legal processes. In this view, the law can be evaluated independently of its ethical implications. Legal positivists typically emphasize the importance of rules, statutes, and the decisions of courts as the primary sources of law.
Logical Positivism: Logical positivism, also known as logical empiricism, is a philosophical movement that emerged in the early 20th century. It aimed to establish a framework for understanding knowledge and meaningful statements based on logical and empirical foundations. Logical positivists sought to clarify the nature of scientific inquiry and demarcate it from metaphysics and non-empirical claims.
One of the central claims of logical positivism is the verification principle, which asserts that a statement is meaningful only if it can be empirically verified or confirmed through empirical evidence or logical analysis. According to logical positivists, statements that cannot be verified in this way, such as metaphysical or ethical claims, are considered meaningless or nonsensical.
While logical positivism was influential in the philosophy of science during its early years, it faced significant challenges and criticism. The verification principle itself was subject to logical problems and was ultimately seen as too restrictive to account for meaningful discourse in various fields, including ethics, mathematics, and metaphysics. As a result, logical positivism gradually declined in popularity and has been largely superseded by other philosophical approaches.
In summary, legal positivism and logical positivism address different domains. Legal positivism focuses on the nature and validity of law, emphasizing its separation from morality, whereas logical positivism concerns itself with the logical and empirical foundations of knowledge and meaningful statements. It's important to recognize that both positions have evolved over time and are subject to ongoing debates and refinements within the fields of philosophy of law and philosophy of science, respectively.
Human rights are usually enshrined in the constitution of any country or Charter as the case maybe, so they are usually part of the laws in a nation and had the force of the law. However, I am of the opinion that human rights itself should be seen and perceived aesthetically rather than a tool of politics.
Whether human laws should be consistent with any ethical principle is hardly a question to be answered in a few lines.
The ethical state is the one telling its citinzens what they should think: the preamble of totalitarism and dictatorship - or, at least, of theocracies.
On the other end, back to the obscure origins of law, we may not disconnect from magic, superstition, mystic and religion. The law used to be the ensemble of rituals and liturgies adopted by a given community to obtain the divine's blessing of their affairs. In ancient Greece the Erynnis pursued the defaulter of a rule, whether legislative or contractual, with the aim of depriving him of mental sanity.
BTW, in the early years fo the Roman empire there was no distinction between public and private law, as every affair was meant to be relevant for the state.
And it is common to most ancient cultures that the priests and the clerks were mandated to administer justice. So that, during the middle ages of Western Culture, it is mostly due to the activism of the clergy that the remains of Roman law endured and afforded the creation of modern common and civil law systems.
All of a sudden someone had the idea of replacing the mth with the logic: human relationships and affairs were to be governed by what appears to be more conveninet from time to time.
It is moral relativism vs. the absolute value of ethical principles.