The right to life certainly is a fundamental human right. It is a negative right since it only requires that others do not kill one. In this context, one should recall that about 169 million people have been killed by states or their governments in the 20th century. Communists and National Socialists established the most murderous regimes. Among the victims of communism, there are tens of millions of deaths from starvation after the coerced collectivization of agriculture in Stalin’s Soviet Union or Mao’s China. Although the 20th century suffered two world wars and other bloody wars, fewer people died on the battlefield or because of bombing campaigns than have been murdered or starved to death by their own governments. Whoever wants to protect human rights should therefore first of all focus on the necessity of protecting people from the state and its abuses of power.
...
As the balance of achievements and victims of communism demonstrates, the attempt to provide entitlements did not prevent tens of millions of deaths from starvation. Actually, the attempt to provide more than negative rights resulted in something less: the lack of respect of negative and positive rights. As I shall argue, this association between the attempt to guarantee entitlements by a monopoly of coercion and central planning is causally related to the repeated failure to protect even the right to life.
Sunday, August 30, 2009
On the impossibility of guaranteeing positive rights without negating negative rights
This is from an article I was reading about positive and negative rights:
The rest of the article is here.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Jekabs,
ReplyDeleteI tried to post a response to this two days ago, but it disappeared in a web failure. I'm a bit swamped at the moment, so this desrves more. I read the pipece, and like most libertarian arguments, I find their view of human purpose and flourishing flat and pragmatic to a fault. I do want to praise him for his point about the problems with totalitarian governments, and he at least made me think about the nature of prosperity and war. What do you think he would do with places like Sweden that don't seem to be experiencing a socialist-induced bloodbath?
I think his main point is philosophical, so I would really like to see your thoughts on that first - do you think that striving to promise positive rights (and deliver on that promise) inevitably requires some curtailment of negative rights?
ReplyDeleteI don't know what he would say about the Scandinavian countries, except to say that he was not making a point that all socialism ends in totalitarian death camps, merely that the examples of death camps we find are all examples of societies that explicitly stress positive rights, not negative rights of individuals.