Why do we say the well fed person has an obligation to feed the straving person but the starving person doesn not have the right to take food from the well fed person? It seems that to some extent, rights indicate what motives can justify the use of force.
Exactly.
We do, in most countries, accept that citizens have a right to food. And we pay taxes to feed the hungry. We just don’t quite get to the cross-border applicability of that right yet.
Did you get this from Bio of a Space Tyrant? That book was written at a time when overcrowding and mass starvation were staring us in the face. Remember the pretty girl that immolated herself in protest.
I guess as long as the sterilization was temporary, I could not see a problem with it.
Its a rather fine point, so far as I am concerned, and inherently situational. It hardly matters whether it is particularly food, for that matter. Water, for instance.
But I phrased it that way for maximum inclusion: we can readily accept that it is wrong for someone to use force to take something, but we can understand and readily forgive if that happens due to some extenuating circumstance. Starvation is just about as extentuating a circumstance as can be imagined.
I read the first three, so I suppose it’s possible that the idea was planted by the novels.
I am not sure that the point is to find the formulation that is most acceptable to this audience but the formulation that would be most acceptable to those in the “original position” (I am implicitly assuming that Rawls’ concept of justice is at least close to the amrk).
But Elucidator, that tells us nothing. Is starvation in the third world caused by strict punishment of starving people who would steal food if only there weren’t laws against it? Is the solution to starvation to just repeal laws against theft of food?
Of course not. Starvation nowadays isn’t caused by totalitarian governments (outside of North Korea), but rather by lawlessness. So your starving third world peasant probably won’t face any sort of legal sanction if he steals food, rather those who have the food have guns and will kill him, and they got that food from people who had food but no guns. Telling him to get himself a gun isn’t much of a solution, because then he’s just another bandit who makes it impossible for everyone else to farm.
So that gets back to the point. The question should not be, “Given that food is a basic human right, what actions by a starving person should we excuse”, but rather “Given that food is a basic human right, what are we non-starving people obligated to do about it?”
I don’t see a lot of people sent to jail for 20 years for stealing a loaf of bread to feed their starving family. And arguing about the ethics of stealing that loaf of bread is just a distraction, because even if we had consensus about what those ethics were, it’s still not going to put bread in the mouths of starving people. OK, I agree, amnesty for all those starving people who stole bread. Let them all free from the prisons! Now what?
No argument from me, but the OP wasn’t posed in terms of practical solutions to real-world problems, but as to the existence of rights. How to solve world hunger? Dunno. Step One will certainly be to raise a determination to do so, what Step Two will be I haven’t the foggiest.
Chicken and egg,do you feed the people already alive ?Or do some cultures keep having children as long as the food aid floods in?When I was in Kenya a few years ago families of 13 children were not a rarity and they were poor as church mice,though high child mortality was taken as a fact of life.