For the sake of debate, where do you think "natural rights" come from? What gives you the impression that there's anything natural at all about human rights? Religious influence aside, they're actually an entirely human construct. And given that rights and ethics are human constructs, who are you to say that it isn't society's (or government's) place to make regulations or legislation regarding ethics and morality? Who cares that morals are relative, if they can be regulated in ways that produce happiness/safety/cooperation/etc which benefit large groups of people?
And
@Lucca since we're discussing the term "natural," I have to take issue with the quote in your signature about poverty not being natural. Poverty is very natural; it's only through the accumulation of wealth and excess material that
relative poverty becomes "man-made." Poverty is essentially defined as not having easy access to food, clean water, sanitation, education, shelter, etc. Since the beginning of humankind people have been deprived of those things, so how can you believe that poverty is unnatural? If you want to claim that poverty is bad, that's fine and I agree, but it's anything but unnatural.
We clearly seem to disagree on what is and is not natural, so I'd like to hear your thoughts about the following, as well: why do you think it is a right to receive healthcare when you are ill, as you mentioned earlier? Rights are actually freedoms
from things being done to you that are unnatural and immoral. Freedom from being tortured. Freedom from your property being stolen. Freedom from unjust imprisonment. Even the "right to life" isn't a right "
to" anything at all, it's the freedom
from being killed. Disease isn't inherently immoral or unnatural, so it's really quite unrelated to the idea of human rights. If you want to claim that healthcare is more important than certain human rights and should be favored over them, that's fine and I actually think I agree, but it's either disingenuous or illogical to claim that healthcare itself is a right. Humans also have the right to not have things stolen from them, and the "right to healthcare" is essentially the "right" to steal healthcare (i.e. intellectual property, medications, procedures) from those who refuse to offer them for free to those who can't pay. When you begin to fabricate rights like healthcare, you pit different rights against each other (i.e. healthcare vs. property, aka the right to steal healthcare vs. the right to not have the medicine you created stolen from you), which really destroys the supposedly intrinsic inalienability of rights altogether. The second quote in your signature also says that no one should die from a treatable disease. Do you truly believe that? Even from a practical standpoint, do you think there could ever be enough supply to meet that kind of demand? Are we all violating the rights of uncontacted African and South Asian tribes to whom we are not offering modern medicine? Healthcare isn't a right, it's just a wonderful thing that we should try to give to as many people as possible at the highest quality possible within reasonable practicality, simply because it's the moral thing to do. If someone drops their books in the hallway, you should help them pick up the books, not because they have a right to your assistance, but because it's a good thing to do.
I propose that you delete those illogical quotes and replace them with the following:
Although things like slavery and absolute poverty are completely natural, they're terrible and we should try to stop them. -Walloobi
Although healthcare can't be defined as a right, it's a wonderful thing and we should try to provide it to everyone. -Walloobi
Lewis Thomas' punctuation guide should stay as is
I think these are good questions, so I'll try to answer them carefully.
First, lets try to be clear about how we use "natural". You seem to mean "natural" as in "observable in nature absent of willful intervention"; i.e, a finite number of resources and ab initio inequality result in poverty "naturally" in the sense that were humans just animals out in the world, poverty would be a natural consequence. If that is what you mean, I agree. In fact, one could argue that a "natural" state by this definition would be almost constant poverty since 100% of existence would be devoted to essentially just meeting basic needs for survival, and, as you define it, poverty is the material absence of those needs. If you mean that poverty is natural simply because it is a historical fact that it has always existed, then I don't agree and I don't really understand how "natural" actually works in that context outside of being a poor synonym for identifying an observation about reality.
Mandela is not trying to make a rigorous argument here. He is trying to highlight that poverty in our modern society has not come about as a result of a law of nature. It is not because there are finite resources that poverty exists, it is because the distribution of the resources that are available is unequal that poverty exists. He is also not just referring to relative poverty which means that some have a lot less than others, he is talking about the type of poverty everyone actually cares about, namely
absolute poverty which means you do not have access to the basic needs of survival. If you live in a society with sufficient resources to eliminate absolute poverty then that poverty is not "natural" but is, in fact, man made because it is by human intervention and design that resources are not distributed in such a way that absolute poverty is eliminated; as long as it is a fact that sufficient resources exist and they continue to be distributed inequitably then it is a fact that any absolute poverty within that society is sustained only by human intervention and, as Nelson Mandela claims, it could be undone by human intervention, in particular, by redistributing the materials necessary to eliminate poverty. Whether or not you think those resources ought to be redistributed, or whether you differ on how they should be redistributed, is a totally separate argument, however, I do not think there is any arguing with the claim that in a rich society absolute poverty is entirely made and maintained by human intervention. If absolute poverty were indeed "natural" in the sense that it is a result of a law of nature then there would be nothing at all anyone could do to alleviate it. It would be like trying to stop gravity or charge repulsion or anything like that. Describing poverty as "natural" in the sense I previously described, "observable in nature absent of willful intervention" (note how this is not the same as the previous definition, a law of nature would be observable in spite of any willful intervention because it is constant), has no value to the actual substance of Mandela's comment which is "we can do something about poverty, so let's do it" so using that definition to argue that his comment is false is just a straw man. In spite of these semantics, I will stick with Mandela's comment. I agree with the spirit of it, with the thrust of what it proposes, and I like the man as a general symbol.
As an aside, slavery is not "completely natural" as your derivation of Mandela's comment state. Not in any sense of the word natural does the natural produce slavery.
Before I move on to your comments about rights, I'll quickly address your iteration of the Paul Farmer quote in that, namely, I do not think it differs in any way other than the literal wording. He specifically states he cannot show healthcare is a human right, but then he makes the assertion that he thinks people shouldn't die of treatable illness. For an illness to be treatable, it is presupposed the means exist with which to treat it. Trying to get adequate healthcare access to everyone we can means using the means that exist to do so or creating the means to do so where they do not exist. He is not making the argument specifically in this quote that healthcare is a human right, although I am absolutely sure that if you asked him he would argue in the affirmative. I'll make my argument below.
"Rights are actually freedoms
from things being done to you that are unnatural and immoral."
You have not had the opportunity to reply to what you meant by "natural" so I will leave out the "unnatural" bit and take the rest of the quote. I will revisit it once you have the opportunity to clarify but I think the rest of the argument will still be relevant.
"Rights are actually freedoms
from things being done to you that are immoral."
This is one way to define
negative rights. Like the example you give, if you have a
right to life then I have a
both a negative duty not to kill you and
a positive duty to prevent others from doing so, otherwise this right can be violated. This statement presupposes that there is no such thing as
positive rights. A
positive right is a right that can only be fulfilled if it is provided. For example, according to the Bill of Rights you have a
right to a fair and speedy trial. This right must be fulfilled to comply with the law and indeed it can only be fulfilled if it is provided for you. Again there are positive and negative duties; I must provide the fair and speedy trial and prevent others from not providing the fair and speedy trial when a trial is due. Etc., etc., etc. for any other number of things universally agreed upon to be rights.
Moving on.
"Disease isn't inherently immoral or unnatural, so it's really quite unrelated to the idea of human rights."
I think I know what you mean by natural here and I completely agree. It would be absurd to argue that "disease" is moral or immoral. It doesn't even begin to make sense and it is unrelated to the idea of human rights. However, healthcare as a human right does not mean "the right to be free of disease". It is the right to receive available interventions to prevent or alleviate human suffering
as a result of disease. Furthermore, it is a positive right. It can only be fulfilled if it is provided. Therefore, I have a duty to ensure interventions are provided to prevent or alleviate that suffering
and a duty to ensure it is not withheld in the same fashion we might ensure a fair and speedy trial and prevent one from being withheld. To be clear, the moral question does not lie in having or not having any particular disease (treatable or not), the moral question is whether given preventable and soluble human suffering we have a duty to prevent and alleviate it. If we do, then healthcare is a human right. If we don't, then it isn't. That's the argument to be had. It's a difficult argument, but I think in your original criticism you missed it. Of course when you enshrine a new right you might obtain conflicts between existing rights. You can elucidate and solve those conflicts, their mere existence does not mean that the right does not exist. In fact, an emergent conflict between an existing right and a "newly formulated" right could illuminate structural injustices and failures in the framework of rights currently accepted. Paul Farmer's quote essentially says, "Yah there's a tough argument to be had here, but let me skip to the point and say that we can do something about treatable diseases, namely treat them, so we should."
"The second quote in your signature also says that no one should die from a treatable disease. Do you truly believe that? Even from a practical standpoint, do you think there could ever be enough supply to meet that kind of demand? Are we all violating the rights of uncontacted African and South Asian tribes to whom we are not offering modern medicine?"
Of course I don't believe anyone should die from treatable disease. It's like asking "do you like good things and dislike bad things?" Why should anyone die from a treatable disease? Of course the word
treatable implies we have the means to treat a disease. If I haven't contacted some tribe in a remote part of the world, how the hell am I supposed to obtain or mobilize the resources to treat whatever disease exists in the tribe? If you
can do something about a disease and
do not then you are acting immorally in my opinion. You might then say, "Well then, the whole world is immoral all of the time!" Duh, of course it is. Any worldview which takes as a given that the world is a moral place all of the time for everyone is making some very, very egregious concessions about reality. The point is to say "we can do better", imagine how that is the case or how to get there, and then do it. People's rights are in fact being violated all of the time, everywhere, all over the world. This doesn't mean those rights dont exist....
Questions about how "practical" something is are harder because it depends on how far you are willing to go. You probably can't "practically" meet the healthcare need in Haiti with Haiti's resources, but that presupposes that the underlying structure of how many resources are where and how those resources are delivered or accessed is completely static. These are questions about tactics, but the moral foundation is unshake, nobody *should* die of a treatable disease. People do and will continue to do so, most likely forever. The mistake is in doing nothing about it, which you imply with your quote, and, frankly, which Paul Farmer implies with his even if all three of us might disagree on how to do so or to what extent.
"Humans also have the right to not have things stolen from them, and the "right to healthcare" is essentially the "right" to steal healthcare (i.e. intellectual property, medications, procedures) from those who refuse to offer them for free to those who can't pay"
I'm going to quickly address this because this is the central ideological argument against the concept of "healthcare as a human right"
This is begging the question. You presuppose that the right to healthcare is the right to steal healthcare. It assumes healthcare is a thing to be stolen and you define it as IP, medications, and procedures. I don't know how healthcare is IP, maybe you could clear that up for me, but I don't think we are giving away patents to patients every time we give them a prescription so I'm going to go ahead and use "medications and procedures" instead until you clarify. "Medications and procedures" are not healthcare. Healthcare, as I explained above, is the intervention against disease with the aim of preventing or alleviating suffering. Medications and procedures are some means of intervention, but they are not healthcare itself. You can't "steal" healthcare. To have a right to healthcare means that a duty exists to initiate intervention when appropriate and to ensure appropriate interventions are not withheld. You don't "steal" that. Take the universally accepted right to legal representation in the court of law. Are you "stealing" from the attorney because you have a right to their service? No, you are not. The service might be free to you but the attorney is compensated. Furthermore, the attorney is freely giving their service (they chose to become an attorney, and furthermore a public servant) and an implication of their role is their duty to certain professional obligations which include protecting your right to representation in the court of law. Similarly, in a scenario where it is given healthcare is protected as a human right, you are not "stealing" from a physician. The physician is still compensated, even if the service might be free to you, and the service is freely given (the physician chose to become one, with the knowledge of the service role and their professional obligations).
Let's take the weaker case, which I think is irrelevant, anyway; namely, where the means of intervention are actually healthcare itself: medications and procedures = healthcare. The medications are not stolen, they are still paid for even if they are free to the individual at the time of service, and neither are the procedures. Given that healthcare is a human right, you have a duty to receive them and in order to not infringe upon the medication manufacturer's or procedure dispenser's rights they are compensated. Nothing is stolen from anyone.
