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The post below on the ostensible right to good health drew some, er, healthy responses. Here are a couple of further thoughts:
It’s one thing to say that “obtaining competent health care shouldn’t be a privelage [solely] for the middle and upper class. Neither should proper nutrition, a solid education, or the ability to safely park your car on your street.“
But there is a difference between saying these are goods that a compassionate society should ensure everyone has access to, and saying everyone has an inviolable right to them. (For simplicity’s sake let’s skip over the property-right issue in the vehicular reference.) Rights summon corresponding and irresistable duties. For instance—hypothetically speaking—if receiving timely medical treatment is an inalienable right, and a shortage of nurses and orderlies is causing unacceptable delays, then there would be a social obligation to draft people into service as nurses and orderlies, whether they wanted to become nurses and orderlies or not. Why? Because, as legal theorist Ronald Dworkin puts it, rights are trumps—the demands of rights outweigh all competing demands. But surely people also have a right not to be forced into servitude. So something has to give.
What has to give is the notion of “positive rights,“ as Isaiah Berlin called them—the right to things, as opposed to “negative” rights from things, most of which boil down to the same thing: the right not to be messed with.
You have a right to freedom of speech, but that negative right not to be messed with while speaking imposes no particular obligation on my part. My only duty is not to interfere with you, which requires nothing. To say, on the other hand, that you have a right to (for instance) housing implies that, if you lack a house, I have an obligation to build one for you, and that if I do not, then I should be made to.
When genuine rights are violated, the machinery of state coercion grinds into action. It is perfectly acceptable for a policeman to use deadly force to stop violations of human rights such as murder, or even looting. It isn’t acceptable for government to exercise its monopoly on the legitimate use of force in order to make you or me dress wounds or empty bedpans.
A compassionate society will see to it that people’s basic needs are met. A compassionate person will, like the Good Samaritan, stop to help his fellow man. But that doesn’t mean my fellow man has an invocable claim on me if I, however callously, don’t.
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