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The irrationality you are noticing is to do with the modern concept of rights. Since the New Deal and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 'right' has com
by objectivistbrit 10y ago
The irrationality you are noticing is to do with the modern concept of rights. Since the New Deal and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 'right' has come to cover things like right to a job, right to healthcare, right to electricity, right to broadband, and so on. But these rights impose obligations on other people, to either work to provide these rights for you, or to stump up the cash to pay for them. That means you need an agency which violates property rights.
Since you can never raise enough taxes to pay for everyone's needs, there's no consistent way to implement the modern notion of rights, so it simply becomes a list of irrational demands.
The only consistent system of rights (of rights which can be granted to everyone equally), take the right to life as a fundamental, and derive other rights from that. The derivative rights in such a system are the Enlightenment-era rights, I.e, life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness.
- dredmorbius 10y agoI'm not opposed to either the ideas of "rights", or of there being conflicting rights, or of there being rights of obligation, say, an obligation to help those in need (good sam laws, mariners' aid laws). I'm not even entirely concerned with rights being apparently, at least at first blush, inconsistent. What I am concerned with is what you've just done: to elevate a single right or a single set of rights to some priveleged status, simply on a say-so. These turn out to be both exceptionally arbitrary, on close examination, and frequently dysfunctional. Take a trolly problem, or a unit in battle, or a sinking ocean liner, or any number of other conditions, with your primacy of right-to-life, for example. Note that life, liberty, and happiness are given in the US Declaration of Independence (though not the Constitution) as unalienable rights. That is, not rights which must be granted (any two-bit punk can claim your life, a zip-tie can restrict your liberty, and a wailing child can remove your happiness), but they cannot be given to another -- unlike your property, or business income, or even spouse and children. So no, actually, I don't find that a convincing argument, though thanks.