The bottom tier includes sex. Do I have a right to sex? How often and with whom?
I think you’re confusing what the government should not stop you from doing with what that government must supply you with.
And again, Bricker’s gone to the nub of the issue. It is meaningless to talk about the right of starving people to have food. Empty words.
But it is assuredly NOT meaningless to talk about the obligation of wealthy people to help the starving. And I agree that such an obligation exists. So rather than arguing over “rights”, what we should be arguing over is what that obligation actually is. And this goes back to what I said earlier…once we stipulate that an obligation of some sort exists, what do we do next?
We already ship lots of food to the third world. What else should be be doing that we aren’t doing now? Are agricultural subsidies of first world farmers morally wrong, or just counterproductive? Is free trade a moral obligation? Open borders? Global governance? Economic development?
I will state for the record that sending warehouses full of food to the capitols of third world countries is a piss-poor method of meeting our obligation to feed starving people. It treats the symptom–starvation–but not the disease–war, anarchy, dictatorship. Sometimes the only thing to do is to treat the symptom. Which we’re doing. But if we have an obligation to stop starvation we’ve got to do more. And by “more”, I mean different.
They got a special latin name for that, right? When you introduce an absurdity and try to claim that it necessarily follows from your opponents argument? A right is fundamental, a government is just that fosters and protects human rights, a government is unjust that does not. Since one cannot meaningfully excercise any human right without being sufficiently well-fed, it follows necessarily that food is either a right or some other category more fundamental than a “right”. Outside of some argument founded on semantic distinction, calling it a “right” is as good as any.
Of course, we may, if you insist, categorize sex as a “right”, and assign the nooky deprived sex workers to assuage their base carnal needs. Given past experience, she would look like Wonder Warthog’s sister Wanda Warthog, and use Old Spice for cologne, but hey! what did you think you’d get with government issued sex?
You may have sex as often as you like … with Helen Hunt. (Sorry, Bricker!)
Seriously, the government should not stop you from having sex with any other adult who also wants to have sex with you (i.e., consensually). The government has no obligation to provide you with sex.
Sex is NOT really like the others. You can live without it indefinitely. Perhaps not COMFORTABLY but there are all sorts of religious and just plain nutty subcultures such as Catholicism that call for some of its members to abjure sex entirely. If sex were a necessity as the others are, such cults would be illegal, I suspect.
As elucidator points out, I have not made the affirmative case that government MUST provide the basic necessities for all. However, any government whose people are starving, naked and homeless and does nothing about it is a piss-poor excuse for a government and should be overthrown.
Yeah, there are a lot governments out there like that right now. And they should be overthrown.
John, what do you think of a government that lets its people starve, go naked and go homeless?
Well, I was just following up on your assertion that the bottom tier of Maslow’s hierarchy was a fundamental right. If you want to retract that assertion, then it’s fine with me.
No disagreement from me. The question is, who does the overthrowing.
I don’t think a government can “let” its people starve. I think people starve mainly because governments force them to starve by instituting practices that deprive them of the freedom they need just to grow their own crops. Sure, there are droughts and other natural disasters, but those are the exception rather than the norm, and there are plenty of countries that can handle droughts and natural disasters as they come.
Exactly. Droughts don’t cause starvation. And this goes back to a fundamental misunderstanding of starvation. Remember the Ethiopian famine of the 80s? Yeah, there was a drought. But Ethiopia has droughts like clockwork, and people live through them just fine. What caused the famine wasn’t drought, it was war. People were wandering through the desert starving to death because they’d been chased off their farms. Same with Somalia in the 90s.
So it’s a mistake to talk about governments “letting” people starve. It’s usually the other way around…governments causing people to starve, or rebels/bandits/revolutionaries/warlords/militias causing people to starve.
I understand why you might want to replace the word “starving” with the wrods “starving to death” because a lot of the moral and ethical jsutifications for a “right to food” make more sense if they are effectively a “right to life” but I thought we were talking about mere starvation with the use of starving to deaqth to highlight exceptionally egregious situations.
http://www.wfp.org/aboutwfp/introduction/hunger_causes.asp?section=1&sub_section=1
Under the heading of WAR:
http://www.wfp.org/aboutwfp/introduction/hunger_who.asp?section=1&sub_section=1
I’m not trying to play gotcha but if you really think that there is nothing we can do about hunger short of deposing dictators and sending troops into war torn areas then you have been depriving yourself of the opportunity to help your fellow man for no good reason.
I would say that the “inalienable rights” discussed in the declaration of independence are more than the legal rights guaranteed by the constitution. There are rights that precede law and the right to food may be one of them.
You may be confusing rights and entitlements. As I undersatand it, entitlement means the government also has to pay for it. I don’t know how you would exercise the right to food (perhaps a right to work or maybe we just need a general acknowledgement that there is a food crisis in the world and that we should take pains to alleviate starvation).
Thought experiment:
I offer to provide food in sufficient quantity to adequately nourish a person, but under the open caveat the food contains contraceptives that will sterilize the person eating it.
What human rights, if any, are violate by my offer?
Who knows how we have to enforce that right but I think we can all agree that living is a basic human right. Not getting slaughtered or exterminated is a basic human right but it doesn’t mean we are legally obligated to intercede on the part of the refugees in Darfur or anything like that but it does mean we have to recognize something very bad is happening in Darfur. Lets say Sudan makes it illegal for refugees to continue living and sentences them all to death, then there is no legal right (its silly I know), but there is still an inalienable human right to live. A right isn’t predicated on being legally enforcable, a human right is innate and inalienable. How we choose to recognize those rights is entirely up to us, the Catholics say a starving man can steal his food, the muslims say the well fed man must share his food, the Republican (at least the good ones) say that you should be provided an opportunity to earn your food, the Democrat says sometime shte government needs to step in and just feed people. Maybe we just worry about the exercise of this right within our borders, maybe we support groups that try to maintain a minimum level of sustenance around the world. However we do things we probably have to recognize the of right of it before we can go about discussing the doing of it.
I say it isn’t.
If your idea of a “right” can be granted simply by an acknowledgement that it isn’t being granted… we simply will have to accept that we have very different ideas of what the word should mean.
In that sense, it really meant that the denial of those rights were suffucient cause for rebelion. But that only meant setting up another government that would secure those rights for the governed. A state of nature does not secure the rights to life, liberty and certainly not the persuit of happiness.
I see what you are saying but there are some rights that are so basic that a just society cannot exist without those rights.
Don’t be so sure. Most societies that have existed didn’t recognize any rights or perhaps confinded the recognition of rights to only a subset of the people in that society.
The operative word being “just”.
And one of those is the right of the unborn child to not be killed in his mother’s womb.
Right? I mean, come on. That one should be obvious.
It isn’t?
John Locke (who was a pretty big in the whole "rights " area) spoke of a right to revolt. To some extent, they must effectuate effective revolt (with or without outside aid) or they must leave.
Again, that’s more an argument centered on what constitutes a person than on what rights the person has. It’s not unreasonable to define a fetus as a person, but we are not compelled by logic to do so, and there is a good argument ((better, if you ask me) that we shouldn’t-- dependance on a particular individual for life.
That’s somewhat libertarian isn’t it? Doesn’t it dilute the entire concept of rights in a discussion of basic human right to say that we have the “right” to do anything that doesn’t hurt someone else, (especially if we are talking about something as fundamentally disturbing as non-Jews getting married). Don’t we need to affirmatively chategorize the non-Jew’s right to get married before we consider it a basic human right?
Of course it is. I think most people agree that the fetus has a right to live but there is a countervailing right of the mother to choose. At what point do we say that the unborn child’s right to live trumps the mother’s right to choose (I don’t know very many people who think the mother’s right to choose is absolute or that the fetus’s right to survive is absolute)? Isn’t that what the debate is all about?
At what point does the starving man’s right to eat trump your right to not feed him?
Shouldn’t we be balancing interests here?