So, if I’m walking down the street with a sandwich, and you’re hungry, you have the right to grab my sandwich (which I worked for, and which you did not), and there should be no problem with that?
As far as I’m concerned, if I’m starving and have no legal means of feeding myself, I have the right to take that sandwich; and if you don’t have a sandwich, I have the moral right to kill and eat you. After all, you are part of the system that wants to kill me. If society has decreed my death, for no other crime than a lack of resources, then it has also decreed the end of all social obligations and morality. If I have no right to live than I have no rights at all, and society is nothing more than a Hobbesian war of all against all and no one owes anyone any consideration at all.
What I argued is that having the right to say what you want is meaningless if you’re not alive to say it. Go down the list ad infinitum, and you’re forced to come to the conclusion that the rights afforded us are contingent upon our ability to exercise them. Logically, then, it stands to reason that since food is a vital necessity and an absolute requirement, there is an implicit right to food. Otherwise the other rights don’t matter at all.
Yes, food is a right. Sustenance is a right. I’m not saying that they should have fillet mignon and foie gras at noon every day, but a well-rounded lunch for anyone that may want it?
Sounds like a GREAT idea to me. (that’s a non-sarcastic great, by the way)
Woah, did you start off your statement about wanting to speak rationally with a melodramatic petulant sigh? Yes, you did. Sort of discredits what follows, y’know.
It is absurd and indecent to debate whether people have a right not to starve to death, and offensively ridiculous to fall into a semantic debate on the issue while people are starving to death right now. Shut up. Just stop. Why can’t you see what a huge useless tool it makes you to even have this discussion, let alone to couch it in terms of intellectual inquiry?
Any law which prevents anyone from feeding the hungry is immoral, indecent, and abhorrent, and there’s just nothing else to be said about it that isn’t a waste of everyone’s time. Any line of thinking which ends “And therefore I can ignore people who are hungry even if I have the means to feed them” is likewise disgusting and pointless, regardless of how it reaches that end.
I don’t give a fuck how well you think you can talk your way into it, to say “the hungry should be fed but it’s not my responsibility to feed them” is despicable.
Do you really think that’s what I’m saying? Because I’m not, not at all. Apparently I’m not making myself understood.
Ensign Edison, I think you’re missing the point. I don’t think that anyone is saying they would not ant to feed a hungry person. There has been a philosophical discussion about what constitutes a fundemental right. Not a legal one created by society (as beneficial as it may be). At that level one has a right to get his own food, either by earning money and then trading it for work or picking berries, fishing, etc.
Let’s say we live in a small society—20 people—and you are hungry. But you don’t want to do anything to procure your own food. Who will you send to procure it for you? And why should they? Seriously. Please answer the question, as it goes to the heart of the matter.
You are…anyone who read your post & thought about it would know that.
Personally, I couldn’t live with myself if I let a person in my community starve to death. Even if that starvation was purely due to laziness on the starvers part. As they slowly wither away, my self righteous feeling that only working people who earn their money deserve to live would start to break down and I’d make the guy a sandwich or something.
If you can show me a real world case where a healthy human being refuses to do anything to get themselves food because they just don’t “want” to, maybe I’ll play your stupid game.
But probably not, because like I’ve said, this whole discussion is abhorrent to me. I am NOT missing the point. Believe me, I understand the point. Perhaps you’ve missed MY point. I made myself perfectly clear as well, so I’m not going to keep hammering it home, but I know you think you’re just having a pleasant little philosophical chat about how perhaps “honoring people’s right to eat doesn’t mean feeding them”* and I think that makes you a grade-A, blue-ribbon, world class asshole. Got it now?
And for the record, if you did find that guy who just refuses to get himself food, I would still fucking give him half my sandwich, because I don’t value human life based on its productivity.
*Which is going right up there with PKD’s “If I had known it was harmless, I would have killed it myself” on my list of mind-blowing statements.
The person you are describing is seriously mentally ill, and deserves compassion for that alone. No mentally healthy person will just sit and starve.
I may be mistaken, but that line gave me the notion that you don’t get out much…
The Declaration of Universal Human Rights (or however it’s called in English) is from the French Revolution. That’s a bew years before Washington et al got a hike in tea taxes.
As someone already mentioned, there’s several European countries where “universal health care” is considered a right. The governments of those countries don’t have soup kitchens but that’s because institutions such as the Catholic Church already take care of that need. OTOH, the USA is the only country I know of where poor people get food coupons.
I may be mistaken, but that line gave me the notion that you don’t get out much…
The Declaration of Universal Human Rights (or however it’s called in English) is from the French Revolution. That’s a few years before Washington et al got a hike in tea taxes.
As someone already mentioned, there’s several European countries where “universal health care” is considered a right. The governments of those countries don’t have soup kitchens but that’s because institutions such as the Catholic Church already take care of that need. OTOH, the USA is the only country I know of where poor people get food coupons.
(PS: the submit is acting up, please mods delete repeats if I end up multiposting)
Bolding mine.
I think it might be you who doesn’t get out much… 
1765 Stamp Act
1773 Boston Tea Party
1776 Declaration of Independence
1789 French Revolution
Also, the document you’re thinking of is called the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen.
This is not an American thing. This is not even a developed world thing.
Universal Declaration of Human Rightswas first put forward in 1948.
The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural rights came into force in 1976 after ratification by members of the UN. You might like to look at Articles 9, 11 and 12 in particular.
Whether you personally feel that the right to adequate food is a basic human right, it would appear that the majority of countries do.
What is sad is that despite the glut of food in the developed world, despite our prosperity, people in even the most wealthy countries can still be starving.
What is even sadder is that starvation is the norm in the developing world.
By depriving people of food we deprive them of health, liberty, education, opportunity to work and support their families and, too often, starvation deprives people of life. Food is a basic right, because without it so many other rights cannot proeperly exist.
Well, I agree we shouldn’t got out and take people’s food away from them. In that sense, I agree that depriving people of food violates a right.
I’m not so sure how that translates to an affirmative legal obligation to go out and give them food.
And before it comes up – I would give up half my sandwich to a hungry person. I volunteer for a cahrity whose mission is to feed the hungry. Directly. As in, making up plates, driving to local spots, and handing them out to people. So I’m not remotely in favor of seeing people starve, and I believe comapssion should compel everyone to act in like fashion, to the best of their means and ability.
What I DON’T believe is that creates a right on the part of the hungry person. That doesn’t give them a claim, a right, an enforceable interest of any kind in being fed. That’s why I recoil from the claim that there’s a “right” to food. I believe people should feel an obligation to provide for the less fortunate. I don’t believe that translates to a right that the less fortunate possess.
So, how do you feel about laws like that cited in the OP, that criminalize giving food to the hungry?
I feel the same way. Which is why I often, when I see a panhandler standing outside an eatery buy him food. But that does not equate to food being a right. I’ll also help a n elderly women who can’t shovel her car out of the snow, bit that doesn’t mean she has a right to have me do it.