Positive rights

You have a jar of candy.

Other people would like some candy, but you keep the jar hidden and take a piece when you want some. I come along and stand next to you, with a sign round my neck saying “Candy Protector”. Now it’s my candy. At least, it’s thanks to me that you have it. Without my protection, you’d be candyless.

But do you know what? I’m worried about you and your candy. It isn’t good for you. It rots your teeth. In your own interests – your own interests, I emphasise – I’m going to take the candy away from you. But that’s cool. After all, without me, you wouldn’t have had any candy in the first place. Your candy comes from me, and so I can take it away.

I see some of the type reasoning from para 2 above, and the danger in para 3 above, in Norm’s defences of the idea that access to clean water, education and housing (aka “positive rights”) should be ranked along with freedom of speech and other “negative rights” and considered to be basic human rights. Yes, I know, scare quotes. But in the context of this argument perhaps reasonable in that I’m questioning the terminology.

But before explaining that properly, I’d like to preface this with the thought that it doesn’t make any difference whether access to clean water is a human right, when it comes to the notion that people should have access to clean water. Personally, I think it’s impossible to overstate the importance of this, this thing we all take for granted in the developed world. I’m not arguing about that. We should do everything we can to help people who don’t have enough to eat, don’t have education, don’t have clean water, who have to breathe in smoke in un-vented huts, who die of, or live maimed by, diseases that are not only preventable, but trivially so.

That isn’t the point.

Here’s Norm’s argument in brief (please do click the links above to see it in full):

The argument is that what the Post calls rights of liberty are natural and universal, while economic and social rights are not, because the former exist of themselves without government action and the latter don’t since they depend on resources being available to underwrite them. As I’ve pointed out before, this distinction is not as sharp as its proponents like to suggest. The rights of liberty also depend upon resources and government action; they do so because they are rights that require protection, and protection isn’t a free good.

Let’s take one right to start with: the right to freedom of expression. This does indeed require protection. But  from whom? The USA has the best protection for free speech that I know of, extending it even to acts like the burning of flags. The form that protection takes is an amendment to the constitution that prohibits the government from encroaching on free speech. The protection is not something done by the government to protect the citizen; it’s a constitutional limitation on the power of government to protect the individual from the government.

This is the first indication that we really do have a category difference between rights that we exercise if we are not interfered with, and nice or vital things we’d like to have that require some input or provisioning by others. The first are protected by the government only in the sense that I protect your candy. The second have to be furnished by some agency, and it could be the government.

Because humans have always had the right to free speech, unless this was encroached on by whatever form government took in the past. But until very recently, the blink of an eye in terms of human existence, nobody at all had clean water. Nobody had what we’d consider to be adequate housing. Nobody had any meaningful health care. But they did have some degree of liberty – to the extent this wasn’t threatened by governments.

Ah, you might say, but what when you’re threatened by foreign powers, from a roving band that might attack you, to a foreign country that might invade you? But roving bands and foreign invaders aren’t primarily threatening your freedom of speech. They want your cattle. And if they do invade and then start limiting your freedom of speech, well… then they’re your new government.

OK, what if something I say annoys someone so much they want to kill me (not a theoretical question in my case). Then the government will, or rather might, protect me, that’s true. But it makes no difference to the government whether I’m being attacked for something I said, or because my driving annoyed someone and there’s a road rage attack, or if I come face to face with a mugger. The government isn’t protecting my speech, they’re preventing a breach of the peace. It’s quite right that they should do so, but let’s not pretend they’re protecting my freedom of expression.

Here’s why we shouldn’t pretend that. Say I’m an evangelical Christian who thinks homosexuality is an abomination. Let’s say I call a local radio program and say so, or stand out in the street preaching and say so. Then I’m attacked by an enraged gay rights advocate. The government would protect me from the gay rights advocate. Then, when they had protected me from attack, they would take me to court for hate speech, in order to make sure I never said anything like it again.

I can say what I like on this blog, unless the government stops me. I can start an anonymous blog and be free from threats of attack – unless the government intervenes and makes my ISP close the blog. People anywhere can read this blog. Anywhere, except those countries whose governments stop their captives from reading freely.

But I’m not going to get clean water unless someone somewhere is cleaning it for me, and that could be the government just as it could be a private company.

Trying to lump in questionable rights with natural ones muddies the waters. There is a massive absurdity in the proposition that I have a basic fundamental right to have someone else go and clean my water for me, or build a house for me. Trying to lump in things like that with natural rights undermines the natural rights, because this is a two way street: it’s as easy and as valid to say that because access to water isn’t a right nor is free speech, as it is to say that because free speech is a right so is access to water. You might end up with neither.

That isn’t a theoretical point. Norm again:

The fact that the Soviet bloc spoke up for social and economic rights doesn’t establish that the concept is not a valid one; it has been defended by liberals and social-democrats of impeccably anti-totalitarian stripe…

Perfectly true, though an assessment of the company you’re keeping with your views has some salience. But the Soviet Union spoke up for social and economic rights for a tactical reason. Let me quote Anatoly Movchan, Soviet delegate to the UN Human Rights Committee:

When reports from socialist countries were considered, some Western experts and members of the Human Rights Committee tried, both privately and officially, to argue that dealing with the problem of human parasites who sponge on other people is a phenomenon characteristic only of socialism, and that authorities who seek to prevent it are guilty of violating the relevant Covenant provision prohibiting forced labour.

The relevant covenant says:

… in accordance with Art. 8 of the Covenant, “any work or service which forms part of normal civil obligations” is not included in the term “forced or compulsory labour.

If it’s a normal civil obligation that you be forced to perform forced labour, then that isn’t a violation of the covenant. The right to work, for the Soviets, became the duty to work, in forced labour camps in the cases of “human parasites”.

I can’t think how this sort of reasoning could happen outside the context of government intervention in the private affairs of individuals, something that adds to my inability to accept the idea we have governments to thank for our freedoms.

What’s the relevance of this? Once you start insisting that your opinions – such as the idea it would be good if everyone had access to clean water – are carved in stone, have the same status as those freedoms that humans have always had unless encroached on, then two things happen. First, natural rights wither, as they did in the USSR. Secondly, opinions start being exercised as though they were fundamental laws, and the idea of a right to work metamorphoses into a justification for slavery.

That’s what’s happened. I can’t think of any exceptions. Why try to make it happen again?

UPDATE: Norm has responded here and I have responded to his response here. If he responds to my response to his response, I’ll let you know.