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wateroverfire posted:That would be a positive right to life - others are obligated to act in such a way that keeps you alive by providing you food, shelter, their kidney (they only need one after all.), etc. Yes, it's well documented that countries with welfare systems routinely slide down the slippery slope of positive rights and are soon harvesting the surplus organs of their populations so they can be redistributed. 
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Feb 26, 2015 18:43
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wateroverfire posted:Welfare is not inconsistent with someone not having a positive right to the thing they're getting from the government. The government can provide benefits out of a sense of charity, or because it seems pragmatic, without the recipient being entitled to the benefit as a matter of principal. And yet you're doing that bizarre conservative thing where you imply that the philosophy of redistribution is inherently totalitarian and logically culminates in people being forced to donate their organs. It's a mildly more sophisticated variation on the idea that Obamacare means soon the government will force you to eat broccoli but you're trying to make it sound like an actual philosophy by sprinkling in some largely meaningless talk about negative vs. positive rights.
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Feb 27, 2015 21:01
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LookingGodIntheEye posted:If a dead person stated that their organs should not be reused for science or to help the living, do the negative rights of a dead person to not have their organs reused trump the positive rights of a living person to stay alive, or to make scientific advancements which keep people alive? I'm not trying to bait or anything here. I don't find the 'human rights' discourse to be particularly helpful except as a way to broadly organize our intuitions about our social obligations to each other. When it comes to actually determining policy outcomes I think it helps to be pragmatic. I mostly posted here to mock wateroverfire for trying to simultaneously assert that we should respect his negative rights while arbitrarily dismissing any positive rights, not to mention his invocation of what essentially amounts to a "fwd:fwd:fwd:fwd:fwd: government healthcare will lead to death panels!!!" argument. As for the specific situation you outlined I think the simplest solution would be to make organ donation the default option for someone who is deceased, with an option for people with strong religious or moral objections to opt out. I assume that public apathy would mean that if the default was to donate your organs then most people would go with the flow and that would probably take care of the organ supply problem without ruffling people's feathers. However, if we were in some super specific situation where a living person could be saved with a dead person's organ then I would probably be inclined to say we should side with the living person because as far as I can tell the dead are beyond all earthly concerns. To form an actual opinion I would need to see a specific scenario though because I feel like morality and ethics tend to be very contextual.
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Feb 27, 2015 22:51
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wateroverfire posted:Dude what are you even on about? If you want to argue for the rule of the strong then just come out and say it instead of trying to re-litigate these tired old arguments about positive vs. negative rights. If you have extra food but don't have any kind of positive obligation feed a starving person then I don't see how you can actually believe that they have any kind of meaningful obligation to not take food from you. I am 100% that if you were being denied food that you needed to live then you'd take whatever necessary steps to gain that food regardless of the negative or positive rights you had to violate, so as far as I can tell you're advocating a system of rights that you would not actually follow when push came to shove.
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Feb 28, 2015 01:51
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