Dean’s post below on positive rights brings up a point that should be clarified.Â
A right is a freedom of action that an individual possesses, and need not be provided by another: if I hit you with a brick, I have violated your right to be free from harm, and if I steal your car, I have violated your right to be secure in your possessions. On the other hand, there are goods and services that are highly desirable, even necessary for life, but these things cannot be rights, and this is demonstrable through a simple exercise in logic.
Let us say your house is on fire, and you live in isolation, with no government around. If we posit a “right to fire service” then your rights have apparently been violated, but by who? If you have a “right” to food, water, and clothing, who has violated your rights by not providing them, in the absence of government? God? The Universe itself? It’s easy to see how this is a nonsensical formulation.
There is an effort underway to define mininum levels of highly desirable goods and services as “rights.” This is being done because it circumvents the normal process of legislating benefits for people and instead places such things at the same level as being free from harm. This is a very dangerous development as it undermines the most basic tenet of Western civilization — freedom. When the “right” to another’s property secured by government action treated is the same as, say, the freedom to speak one’s mind, it becomes considerably easier for those in power to supply the former rather than the latter.
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Or as PJ O’Rourke put it, "Freedoms must be free. You have a right to bear arms, but you don’t have a right to take a gun without paying for it."
As any third grader taking a civics course could probably tell you, talking about a positive right in the context of there not being a society IS nonsensical. But we do live in societies, as it happens, so the concept is not, in fact nonsensical. You might think that it’s a bad idea of course, and many people do, myself included for many assertions of positive rights. One of the biggest problems with how most people try to claim positive rights is that they claim that they try to place the burden of meeting them on specific people, when in fact moral burdens fall on everyone equally. But that’s neither here nor there when it comes to whether the concept makes sense.
Indeed, by most real world interpretations of rights, negative rights don’t really exist without a society/government either. You can claim to have all sorts of rights against this and that, but it won’t mean jack squat unless the society and legal system recognizes them.
Obviously you have a different understanding of what a simple demonstration of logic entails.
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But we do live in societies, as it happens, so the concept is not, in fact nonsensical.Â
It is if we are talking about the rights of an individual as opposed to the obligations of a society. The former is a matter of right, the latter a function of the laws of gov’t. That’s why these goods and services cannot be individual rights; the “right” to them simply cannot exist without a society to provide them.
Indeed, by most real world interpretations of rights, negative rights don’t really exist without a society/government either.
Not so. Rights originate from our status as sentient beings and are not granted by society. The benefits being called "positive rights" can only be given to an individual by a society.
You can claim to have all sorts of rights against this and that, but it won’t mean jack squat unless the society and legal system recognizes them
No, you cannot derive rights from the legal system, because this implies that if you live somewhere like N Korea then you have no rights.  The reality is North Koreans do have rights, which are being violated by their government.
The legal system exists to protect our rights; it does not create them, but merely describes and codifies rights that already exist.
Rights are also not created by claims; rights simply are.
It might be more difficult to redress a violation of one’s rights without a formal society-level organization (though not impossible; Heinlein’s TMIAHM gives an example of individuals acting without government), but that wouldn’t change the fact that you still have such rights even without a society or government.
The legal system exists to protect our rights; it does not create them, but merely describes and codifies rights that already exist.
It would behoove anyone wishing to seriously discuss rights, liberty, constitutional jurisprudence, or a finding of a right to abortion in the US Constitution to carefully peruse the writings of one Antonin Scalia. He appears to be quite well informed on such matters.
A sample quotation:
"People look at rights as if they were muscles — the more you exercise them, the better they get."
I’m mostly with Bad.
You assert a concept of "positive" vs. "negative" rights that I just don’t buy.
A simple question: Why do you have a positive right to police enforcement of your negative rights? So what if someone beat you down and took all your money out of your pockets. Yes, your negative rights were violated. Tough titties for you. Are you asserting that you have POSITIVE RIGHTS for police and prosecutors and judges to enforce your negative rights? Or should I just pay a monthly "cop fee" to make it all happen?
I just don’t buy the whole paradigm. I think it’s a shell-game argument. "Positive" vs. "Negative?" What? Who the hell ever said those were the only choices?
Here’s a positive right I’m all for. And it offends the multi-culties to boot. When the British held India, they declared that suttee (the practice of burning widows to death on the funeral pyres of their husbands) was murder, and those who practiced it should be hung by the neck until dead, dead, dead.
What, these women and their families don’t have a negative right to practice their religion? They don’t have a negative right to tell the state "this is no business of yours, leave us alone?" "Who are you, white man, to poke your nose into our business, this is a family affair!"
The Brits, ever sensible, simply said, "Our culture says this is unacceptable, so you can do it if you want but if we catch you we will execute you."
And British law enforcement, mostly using local Indians as cops, enforced it.
Did that Indian widow have a POSITIVE RIGHT to law enforcement to protect her, or did she not?
The law currently says that if you don’t pay your phone bill, your phone service can be cut off but you’ll still get a dial tone if you dial 911. Please explain to me how this is is a bad thing.
Other positive rights:
Someone is providing you roads, and protection to make sure you’re not killed on them. And if you get waylaid, someone is there to scrape you off the pavement and take you to a hospital, or arrest the miscreants who stuck you up.
Someone is providing you with the right to vote in a free and fair election. With anonymity. With people to enforce it if you or those around you cheat. With people paid (sometimes without pay on a voluntary basis) to make sure it’s a free and fair count.
I look right here at the Bill of Rights, and here is what I see of all 10 amendments:
1) Right to free speech, free religion, and right to petition the government for redress of grievances: great, you have these "negative" rights, but do you have a positive right of police enforcement if someone wants to beat you down to prevent you from exercising any of them?
2) A militia (a.k.a. all standing adult male citizens) have a right to bear arms. What if I don’t want my local citizens to have any such right? Do you have a right to police and courts to back you up?
3) No quartering of troops in your house without you giving explicit permission. Do you have any positive rights to someone to enforce that?
4) What, you don’t want them going through your house and rummaging through your papers? Where did your right to have someone enforce that come from? Someone’s got to pay that cop’s salary.
5) Due process, eminent domain, etc.: did you want to pay that judge something? Just curious.
6) Anyone gonna pay that judge or jury?
7) Anyone gonna pay that jury? They have lots of other things to do besides sit around determining if you’ve been treated fairly.
It can go on. What do you think the Constitution was saying when it said the Government could establish "postal roads," do you think? Were they asserting any "positive rights" there? Who paid to build those roads?
I don’t buy it. "Positive" vs. "Negative" rights is a false paradigm, an either/or choice that we don’t have to make.
Where did you get your positive right to have me (by coercion) enforce your negative rights, by the way? Just curious.
False paradigms are very seductive.
Positive rights, negative rights – the words don’t really work, because they carry connotations that are counter-intuitive, while implying a falsely larger scope than really exists.
There are only rights.
Anything else is at least pseudo, phoney, fake , an appeal to power (right of might), or whatever else one might think of to call them…
Here are rights as I see them: when alone on a desert island, there are many things I can do — no one can stop me.
But most importanty, they do not harm anyone else nor impinge upon the rights of anyone else (how can they, there is no one else there…)
I am allowed to live, feed myself, seek or create shelter, move about as I wish, and otherwise try to make myself more comfortable and happy with my life.
I can say whatever I want.
I can bear a rock.
I can bear a firearm.
I can write things down on paper and distribute them to everyone on the island.
I can assemble with whomever I choose.
I can shout "fire" in a theatre (Fire Marshal’s maximum occupancy rating: 8 ).
Then seven people on a three-hour cruise arrive on my idyllic island. Does anything change?
Without harming or impinging on the rights of the new immigrants (they have the same ones that I have), I can still:
..,be allowed to live, feed myself, seek or create shelter, move about as I wish, and otherwise try to make myself more comfortable and happy with my life.
I can say whatever I want.
…say whatever I want.
…bear a rock.
…bear a firearm.
…write things down on paper and distribute them to everyone on the island.
…assemble with whomever I choose.
and I can still I can shout "fire" in the theatre.
But if that 8 person theatre suddenly becomes crowded with the entire population of the island, and I shout "fire", I might actually induce a panic that could cause injury. There is no right to induce panic. There are reasons why that might not be a good thing.
I also can’t make someone move from his rock because I think I will be happier sitting there, than on that other rock. Or take a fish that the goofy guy caught, and eat it myself without his permission. And I can’t coerce him into it, either. And on and on.
Now I have a society, and my rights still exist. The only difference is that now I have to make sure not to impinge on anyone else’s rights while exercising mine. That is all.
If the other seven people get together and decide that I have to give them some percentage of my daily catch of fish so that they can feed themselves, they are not exercising a right (even if they call it that). I think the reason why is, by now, fairly obvious…
My right were’t granted by anyone, they just existed, and they still exist whether or not anyone else chooses to recognize them. If the concept can’t exist without a society’s involvement, then it isn’t a right, it’s a benefit (or an obligation), one that woud ostensibly be for the betterment of that society.
Bills of Rights, Charters of Rights, etc. exist in order to put societies on notice that the government is a aware of these rights, and the rest of society should be too, in order to assist us all in respecting the rights of others while we go about exercising our own rights. These documents do not "grant" us anything.
x-posted on cerdipity
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