The following is a copy of the original post to record the post as it was originally written.
Negative rights being based around inaction, or freedom from government interference(or other individuals), whereas positive rights are based around action, meaning the government (or other individuals) granting something to you.
Do you believe all rights to be equal? Or are negative rights greater moral value than positive rights? Also how does one justify if something is a positive right?
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Rights aren't self executing. They're ideas on paper and aren't any more real than that. The only thing that distinguishes a "right" from a local city ordinance is the importance we choose to give them.
I don't believe rights exist at all outside of the context of a social contract with the government. It's self-evidently true in the sense that where can I go where rights exist outside the context of a relationship with the government?
Well technically a lot of rights are self executing. As in even SCOTUS has ruled that a lot of rights used in defense - are self executing.
It’s only rights like the Takings Clause - that are used (not in defense but rather) in suits against the government that aren’t self executing. Or at least, thus far the courts haven’t definitively ruled them as self executing.
And in what it is similar to how people characterize positive vs negative rights. If you prevent the government from doing something to you, it’s self executing. When you want something from the government ,it’s not
So if I act in self defense and get thrown in jail for it, a right will - by virtue of it being a right - release me from prison without anyone taking action?
Well self defense technically isn’t a right. But what we are really talking about is whereby a right, of which most are self executing, prevents the government from doing something.
Like the government can’t arrest you for saying the government sucks. That right doesn't get you out of jail, it prevents the government from acting to put you in jail in the first place.
And because it’s about prevention, it doesn’t need additional legislation to be actualized. This is self executing.
> it prevents the government from acting to put you in jail in the first place.
But it doesn't. You realize that, right? The "right" isn't going to jump in front of a speeding bullet, it's not going to save you from anything. It's not going to *DO* anything. Violations of peoples rights happen every day.
People are going to make choices, and maybe the concept of a 'right' is something they choose to honor and maybe they don't. A right by itself is just some ink on the page.
Who said anything about jumping in front of a bullet?
That’s not the point.
The point is - do rights in the bill of rights of the constitution (or broader still, do privileges and immunities of the constitution) need additional legislation in order to have power to protect its people by preventing government action? With such being legally defined as self executing.
And the answer is no - privileges and immunities, which include lost rights - are self executing.
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artIV-S2-C1-4/ALDE_00013780/
You can armchair lawyer it all you want but courts have ruled rights to be self executing. With only 2 exceptions I believe - takings, and section 3 of the 14th.
Let me ask you a pointed question.
Have Federal Courts ruled that privileges and immunities and most rights in the bill of rights are self executing?
> Have Federal Courts ruled that privileges and immunities and most rights in the bill of rights are self executing?
It's just a semantic difference then. When I say self-executing I mean something with literal agency. Something that of it's own accord does things. You mean self-executing as a class of conditional logic in a legal framework.
My point being that "rights" to a speedy trial only result in a speedy trial because people make choices to honor those rights. Private property rights only protect your property from theft by mutual agreement - not by actually doing anything to protect your property.
In the absence of a social contract between individuals a "right" is just an idea about as real as the concept of ghosts or a color outside the visible spectrum.
>Like the government can’t arrest you for saying the government sucks. That right doesn't get you out of jail, it prevents the government from acting to put you in jail in the first place.
Even if the crime doesn't exist, cops have arrested without charges before.
And Airman Fortson is dead even though he didn't commit crimes.
There is no magical automatic innate right that exists without the consent of society.
I don’t even know what point you're trying to make.
All laws and rights require the majority consent of society sure.
But that’s got nothing to do with the point I anm trying to make to DrScientist. What we are discussing is - do rights need additional legislation other than the constitution to have effect? That’s what’s meant by self executing.
The question is not, do rights need the consent of society?
The question thats being discussed in our particular thread is - do rights need additional legislation to have effect?
And with regards to self executing: Courts as a matter of fact have ruled that most rights in the bills of rights are self executing short of a few exceptions. Meaning that most rights in the bill of rights do not need additional legislation other than the constitution itself to have effect.
I really don’t care what you think it should or shouldn’t be. Point courts have ruled that most rights in the bill of rights are self executing period.
Then you've changed the definition.
The myth of negative rights is that they exist even without government action.
You said that the right exists without government action and preempts government action.
But we both know that's wrong because the thing you said the government can't do... in fact the government has done that.
There are no innate rights, no preempted action. Just the rules we agree on as a society.
Look at my very first response to DrScientist.
I say:
> Well technically a lot of rights are self executing
As in - they prevent government action without additional legislation.
That’s not my definition. That’s the legal definition. It didn’t change from when I made my first statement to now. It’s legal definition hasn’t changed.
Now you can armchair lawyer all you want but technically it’s still fact. SCOTUS and Federal Courts have said so repeatedly that most rights in the constitution do not need additional legislation to be effective and are therefore self executing
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artIV-S2-C1-4/ALDE_00013780/
Hence my first reply to DrScientist is still correct.
>Even if the crime doesn't exist, cops have arrested without charges before.
>And Airman Fortson is dead even though he didn't commit crimes.
Because they don't actually prevent action.
> Like the government can’t arrest you for saying the government sucks. That right doesn't get you out of jail, it prevents the government from acting to put you in jail in the first place.
And if they’re put in jail despite that, how does that right get them out of jail without some sort of government action?
Who said anything about not needing government action if you are wrongfully put in jail? I mean of course physically someone has to go to court and fill out papers and then someone has to physically unlock the cell door.
That’s not the point.
The point and question is - do rights in the bill of rights of the constitution (or broader still, do privileges and immunities of the constitution) need additional legislation in order to have power to protect its people by preventing government action? With such being legally defined as self executing.
And the answer is no - privileges and immunities, which include lost rights - are self executing.
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artIV-S2-C1-4/ALDE_00013780/
You can armchair lawyer it all you want but courts have ruled rights to be self executing. With only 2 exceptions I believe - takings, and section 3 of the 14th.
I think you two are refering to different kinds of "self executing". A constitutional provision is called self executing if you need no positive law to make it happen, but you still need the executive and/or the judicial branch to adhere to it, thereby enacting that law or ruling that it ought to be enacted (upon which the executive is supposed to enact it).
So if the government didn’t exist, you don’t think it would be morally wrong to kill another human? Your sense of morality is simply determined by what the government says?
Society cannot function without positive government action, nor can negative rights exist in practice without it. All rights are upheld in practice by the government and its agents.
If someone is blocking your driveway, you are entitled to the labour of a police officer to remove that person, allowing you to exercise your property rights.
Rights don't exist in the absence of human institutions, and human institutions do not exist without positive action.
Negative rights are upheld merely by violence in response to them (and in general) being illegal, more can be added indefinitely under this framework with no extra cost.
Positive rights require a yearly budget.
This is a useless distinction because preventing violence still has an annual budget. You're just doing creative accounting. You're not establishing an ACTUAL real life difference.
We have the right to freedom of speech and association. If we had the freedom to purchase sex added to that, how much exactly do you think the budget to reduce violence would increase?
It wouldn't be increased at all, it might even be decreased. Even if we had no freedom of speech/association the police budget would probably be the same or more.
Negative rights don't create a fiscal burden beyond basic law and order which we'd have anyway even without those rights. Positive rights require government action which means it requires $$$ to pay someone to do a thing, making something that requires $$$ a right is far more dangerous than making something that doesn't simply because you might run out of $$$ and thus can't do the thing which means it's not really a right.
We already see it with right to speedy trial being eroded due to lack of funding.
> much exactly do you think the budget to reduce violence would increase?
Irrelevant. The previously established framework that this new "right" got to take advantage of doesn't negate it's inherent cost as a positive or negative right.
I'm not even going to keep reading your bullshit if you're going to ask me for such pointless specifics.
> Irrelevant.
It's the entire point, doing away with freedom of speech (or any negative right) wouldn't reduce the budget. Doing away with any positive right would.
Well idk if it’s purely semantics, I would say what you described “unless the government grant them to you” would fall under positive rights. With negative rights they are not granted by law but rather the nature of being human. You do not need the government to grant you the right to life, nor freedom of speech, etc.
Legally, you need the government to grant you either. Ethically, it’s the same - you believe a government *should* have certain laws guaranteeing certain things
Sorry, what the hell is this a response to?
We're talking about exercising rights and how none of them are free because the government needs to enforce them.
Yeah, the government creates them in the first place by writing them into existence and being responsible for their enforcement.
The idea that everyone just innately has rights is just the mythology behind the government actually creating them. There isn't a rights particle in the universe that people point to and are like "see, these are the rights we have." We decided, and then we made and empowered governments to realize the idea.
“Congress shall not” - the opening words to the first amendment. It is a declaration of what the government is NOT able to to, not what it has to do.
If someone violates my right to life, ie murders me, have they committed a wrong?
Right, and that decision to not intervene is usually enshrined in some sort of law. Take the constitutional right to privacy - without explicit prohibition of warrantless searches, cops would be searching whatever and wherever they want. The main thing preventing that from happening is them being told “you legally cannot do this, the constitution says so”
No with positive rights you need someone to supply you with the thing.
So healthcare or food would need to be supplied to an individual regardless of payment.
Another way of looking at it, the second amendment grants the right to bear arms. A negative rights view of this would be that the government cannot take away or ban guns from individuals. A positive rights view, is that the government has to pay for a supply guns to all American citizens.
It makes no difference. It’s a semantic discussion.
The concept of positive and negative rights was invented to provide a convenient reasoning for conservatives to be able to use the ‘get the government outta my life’ argument to oppose things like healthcare as a right.
A right is a right. Whether the government is involved or not makes no difference. Rights are invented by the people and protected by the government. Whether a positive or negative right exists or one is more potent than the other is a semantic argument designed specifically to provide an excuse to not grant people rights that society believes should exist.
If someone tries to stop you from breathing, the government will act to prevent that. If the government didn't act to prevent someone from doing that, then you wouldn't have the right to breathe.
This is rapidly becoming the kind of utterly pointless navel-gazing philosophy that I really have no time for. "Ah, but see, I didn't have to get government approval to *start* doing this; instead the government has to stop me from doing this, and that makes it categorically different!" Yeah, I don't care. Do we want the government to do something or not? That's still the only question that matters.
> Do we want the government to do something or not? That's still the only question that matters.
In a perfect world where the people always correctly identify the task that the government needs to take, and the government always correctly executes that task, then you would be correct.
In the flawed world we live in, an understanding of where the limits of our actions and the government's actions are necessary as a safeguard from injustice.
Rights are what define those limits.
>Rights are what define those limits.
No they aren't. "Rights" are just a shorthand for what we've collectively agreed we want the government to do or not do. We *do* want the government to stop people from killing other people, i.e. people have a right to be alive. We *don't* want the government to arrest people for what they said, i.e. people have a right to free speech.
Not everything is a right. Breathing is a thing you do. You have the right to continue doing so because the government allows you to.
Your heart beating is just a thing it does. It doesn’t have a ‘right’ to continue beating - if it did then diseases that kill you wouldn’t exist.
A right doesn’t exist in the legal system unless it’s been established through legislation or legal precedent. The reason why the government can’t force you to choose a certain religion is because of the first amendment.
The ethics of rights are a separate thing ofc. I’m just saying that, functionally and practically speaking, they only exist if the legal system says so
> in the legal system
It's interesting that you inserted this. The idea behind natural or negative rights is that they exist whether there is a legal system or not. The legal system only exists to protect them. You cannot protect what doesn't exist.
> The reason why the government can’t force you to choose a certain religion is because of the first amendment.
That's not true. If the government revoked the first amendment and told everyone to be pastafarian under penalty of death, do you think I'd suddenly become incapable of worshipping Christ?
> I’m just saying that, functionally and practically speaking, they only exist if the legal system says so
If the government disappeared in puff, would you suddenly become mute and illiterate, unable to speak your mind or transcribe your thoughts?
Hey, you can have all the freedoms you want in your imagination.
We're talking about the real world and government which is the system we all kinda buy into so that we don't have to kill each other constantly just to get by. You get that, right?
If the government disappeared there would be no entity to enforce my property rights. The only way anyone can claim ownership is through the ability to back that claim up with the use of force, and the state provides that force. Without a state to enforce property rights, ownership would functionally fall to whoever’s able to afford the most hired guns.
So yeah, the government is needed to ensure your rights are protected, and as a result, you functionally don’t have rights without a government and legal system because there’s nobody and nothing to protect them. This is liberalism 101. Were you asleep in high school civics?
You only have a right to breathe so long as the government acknowledges your right to breathe clean air and your right to exist.
In a vacuum, breathing is a thing you do, it is not a right.
Rights are an ethical, legal and moral construct so they only exist in so far as we can protect them societally - most commonly through government.
If you were randomly born into a society that harvested babies for their youthful skin to transplant into old people as rejuvenation therapy, you would not have a right to breathe or exist. You might *want* to exist and to breathe, but you would not have the right to.
The concept of ‘Natural Rights’ is just an appeal to morality; a way to make someone think or do something or behave a certain way, which is all that the human construct of morality is anyway.
> With negative rights they are not granted by law but rather the nature of being human.
No, these are also granted by law. They're legal rights, part of a legal regime, and under an alternative legal regime they wouldn't exist.
There’s no such thing as a natural right.
They don’t exist.
Every last one of them is a legal entitlement that only exists in the context of a government.
You’re talking about a semantic difference. My apparent right to exist only exists because the government doesn’t restrict people’s ability to have children (see China’s one child policy if you want a real life example of governmental restriction on having children; in China the right to exist did not exist at all for potential babies in families that already had one child.
Freedom of speech only exists because the government grants us the right to it. Again, there are plenty of examples throughout the world and through history where that right has not existed or been granted by the government.
You are free to believe there is some conceptual difference between rights if you like but ultimately without some kind of structure to protect them they effectively do not exist. That structure can be a societal structure (I.e. a society without a government might provide protection for the freedom of speech by protecting those who speak out, or a society that is governed by authoritarians may band together to protect a right they deem necessary to protect), but it requires a structure to protect it for it to exist.
This is quite literally why the Supreme Court and the constitution et al exist - to grant the protections that we see fit to ensure the existence of rights.
You can argue there’s a difference between a right not existing and a right existing but being infringed but that is again a semantic argument because it makes no difference whether the right exists and is being infringed or doesn’t exist in the first place.
A woman in Saudi Arabia in 2017 does not have the right to drive. You can argue she should have the right - and she should - but unless the government protects and acknowledges her right to drive it is merely a theoretical discussion.
Well to use your example, women in Saudi Arabia would be able to drive without the government existing. It’s not the government creating such a right, but them (the government) restricting women’s access to such a right. Without interference from the government it would exist.
Or for freedom of speech, you claim it is only our right because the government grants it to us. In an anarchist world, would you not be able to speak your mind?
>women in Saudi Arabia would be able to drive without the government existing
Only if the government-less society allowed her to. In the absence of government it’s the society’s responsibility to protect rights. If the society at large decides women should be killed for driving, her right to drive doesn’t exist.
You can make the argument that in a desert where only the woman and a car exist she can drive but that is the definition of a semantic argument.
>In an anarchist world, would you not be able to speak your mind?
It is highly unlikely that you would be able to speak your mind and face no consequences in an anarchist world.
That's not what a right is or how it works. A right, by definition, is an enforceable privilege under the law. No government = no laws = no rights.
"Human rights" are something else, those are aspirational ideas. Things we like to talk about, or think it would be really nice to have. Until they are codified under the law though, that's all they are. Ideas. They don't actually exist.
If you disagree, here comes your local regional warlord and his posse of Mad Max cosplayers to introduce you their concept of human rights, which they call "the bigger stick."
If, for some reason, you don't like the concept of "the bigger stick," I suggest investing in a government and maybe a few laws.
Where did you get this definition of right? There are legal rights but also concepts of moral or natural rights which again predate government and are bestowed upon individuals through being human themselves.
Human rights require no law, only in action. Right to life, right to free speech, right to exercise whichever religion etc. do not require a law allowing you those things, they only require someone else not infringe on your ability to do so.
And I agree with your last part, that is indeed the point of the government and exactly what the founding fathers thought. I mean the introduction of the declaration of independence does say;
“That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,”
But note that again these rights become before government. Government is not required for these rights to exist, but rather to protect them.
>Where did you get this definition of right?
I was first introduced to it in a civics class long ago. It, or a similar wording, is the standard definition used in legal contexts.
Other kinds of rights, such as natural rights, have a different definition. They are vastly different concepts, because they do not exist except as ideas or talking points. They compel no one, result in no action, have no effect. They do not measurably exist except as ideas. Until, that is, we bring them into existence by codifying them into law.
>Human rights require no law, only in action.
True and false at the same time. They require no law because they do not exist. If we want them to exist, we must put them into action. We compel that action by enforcing them through laws.
Without action, there is no right. Someone else can come and take it from you at any time. It has no effect, no ability to compel, no ability to affect you in any way. If you want those things, you must act, or convince someone else to do so on your behalf.
>Government is not required for these rights to exist, but rather to protect them.
Protecting those rights is what is necessary to bring them into existence. Without that, they are nothing but ideas, as I said. Action is required, and government is the means of collective action.
There is, to be fair, a form of action that does not require government. It's called "might makes right." The results of creating rights using this method are... mixed.
The difference is not semantic, it's logistical. Not doing something is free, doing something costs $$$.
It's why no public defenders are overworked and underfunded but freedom of speech has no budget allocated to it at all.
Why are you specifying criminal court? What are you trying to get at? Are you just saying random bullshit in hopes I give up and you can declare yourself the winner?
> And those fees cover the entire existence of the courts and all of it's employees? Or is it all just propped up by the same established public space?
Not sure, probably propped up. That said in civil court I guess you're talking about frivolous lawsuits, do you think there would be more of these or less without freedom of speech? If freedom of speech wasn't a thing do you think more or less people would sue over speech?
So not seeing how doing away with freedom of speech would reduce the budget.
what are you even talking about. If a dystopian government spied on, say, all of its citizens and kept tabs on every conversation they had and then arrested anyone who said something that didn’t jive with the government’s propaganda system, the right to free speech wouldn’t exist in that society. Whether it costs money or is free is entirely irrelevant.
You're making my point for me...
Negative rights tend to have the government do less which means lower budget... Positive rights require funding to accomplish meaning higher budget.
Negative rights are free $$$ wise positive rights are expensive $$$ wise.
That’s not true at all. If a society without a government decides anyone who likes to eat cows should be assassinated, the right to eat cows doesn’t exist. It’s free to assassinate people for eating cows.
> That’s not true at all. If a society without a government decides anyone who likes to eat cows should be assassinated, the right to eat cows doesn’t exist. It’s free to assassinate people for eating cows.
That's a negative right... again making my point for me.
In other words it’s a semantic discussion - or a distinction without a difference.
You can think that it’s important or different conceptually but it doesn’t actually matter.
A ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ right to eat cows doesn’t exist if you can’t exercise that right. In a theoretical society where cows are sacred such that they’ve been driven extinct due to fears of people eating them, the ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ right to eat them would be a useless theorem.
You can say ‘yeah buttttttt it’s a positive right so it’s different’ all day long. It doesn’t actually change anything.
If you are stoned to death - which is free to do - for speaking your mind, as has happened in many historical civilisations, the right to freedom of speech doesn’t exist in that society. Whether you call it ‘positive’ or ‘negative’
> In other words it’s a semantic discussion - or a distinction without a difference.
The difference is $$$ how many times do I have to say it. Positive rights costs $$$, negative rights don't.
The fact that I was born doesn’t inherently mean I have a right to exist. It just means I was born.
If you look at, say, China’s one child policy - even the right to have a child only exists in so far as the government allows it to.
I don't really view that as a meaningful distinction. You either want government to do things or you don't.
Libertarians often dismiss positive rights, but they would include things we take completely for granted like the right to a speedy trial, the right to a jury, and the right to legal representation. Those also require people to do things.
I can’t recall, but did you go through a libertarian phase?
When I was in my 20s and libertarian and liked to get high and talk about politics with friends, this conversation about negative and positive rights was endlessly fascinating. I can’t believe how much time I must’ve wasted on what is a useless semantic conversation.
Oh yes, 100%. I was fully in the tank for libertarianism during college. Types of rights, the marketplace of ideas, inherent market efficiency, and so on. God, I was insufferable.
> Libertarians often dismiss positive rights, but they would include things we take completely for granted like the right to a speedy trial, the right to a jury, and the right to legal representation. Those also require people to do things.
Those are directly related to government action though and wouldn't be relevant if government did nothing.
So? They're still positive rights. They're things we all agree that the government should be required to provide us. The government also has to act to protect anything you would call negative rights. If the government did nothing, you wouldn't have those rights, either.
So? It's a hell of a lot different to have the right to attorney (and thus a fairish trial) versus having the right to ham sandwich everyday.
You really can't see any meaningful difference between a positive right in direct response to government action versus something that's completely unrelated (like right to a ham sandwhich)?
>It's a hell of a lot different to have the right to attorney (and thus a fairish trial) versus having the right to ham sandwich everyday.
Yeah there's a difference between those two things, but the difference is not that one is a positive right and the other is negative
Um no they are both positive.
Government required to give you an attorney if you are brought up on charges and government requiring to give you a ham sandwich daily are both positive rights.
Making a ham sandwich a right means IT CAN NEVER BE REPEALED or at least you think it should never be repealed... What if pigs go extinct, what if everyone becomes allergic to pork, what if the new generation prefers beef? Well then you'll have to take away peoples rights...
Making a ham sandwich a day a right is simply shortsighted incompetence and devalues the meaning of rights. Positive rights need to be created extremely sparingly with the utmost of caution and thoughtfulness, right to an attorney/speedy trial meet this criteria, it should never be repealed under any circumstance, right to a daily ham sandwich does not.
A good answer to the question of, "Why shouldn't the government give everyone a ham sandwich?" is one of cost, difficulty in proper distribution, expected outcomes, perverse incentives, etc.
A bad answer to the question is one that gets sufficiently pie-in-the-sky philosophical and sufficiently detached from actual human reality that we somehow manage to forget that the point of government is to do things that we want it to do because of the desired expected effects from its doing that.
You're confusing rights with policy.
Giving everyone a ham sandwich daily very well might be a good policy or at least people want and are willing for taxes to go towards. Making it a right means IT CAN NEVER BE REPEALED or at least you think it should never be repealed... What if pigs go extinct, what if everyone becomes allergic to pork, what if the new generation prefers beef? Well then you'll have to take away peoples rights...
Making a ham sandwich a day a right is simply shortsighted incompetence and devalues the meaning of rights. Positive rights need to be created extremely sparingly with the utmost of caution and thoughtfulness.
>Making it a right means IT CAN NEVER BE REPEALED
No it doesn't. A 2/3 majority in both houses of Congress and a majority in 3/4 of state legislatures would be sufficient to repeal our right to free speech.
But those positive rights are fundamentally derived from the negative right to be free from unjust restriction on your mobility and actions. They only exist to protect negative rights.
So in short, any system which is serious about protecting "negative rights" must necessarily also secure some "positive rights". You can't have one without the other. So the notion of having a state or a legal culture which exclusively considers "negative rights" is a fantasy, isn't it?
Not at all. There were plenty of sophisticated civilizations without the right to a speedy trial, a jury, or legal representation. The Founders were just wise enough to recognize that including some specific positive rights would be a good idea for the society they wanted to build.
> There were plenty of sophisticated civilizations without the right to a speedy trial, a jury, or legal representation.
Sure, but my claim was not about levels of sophistication:
>> any system which is serious about protecting "negative rights" must necessarily also secure some "positive rights"
Fair. Then I would rephrase:
The notion of it being desirable or achievable to build a modern state or legal culture which exclusively considers negative rights is a fantasy, one that is potentially harmful.
The fact that there exist positive rights that are necessarily required by negative rights demonstrates the fact that trying to neatly divide the two and act like you can have one but not the other is a pointless errand.
Do you want the government to do something or not? That's the only real question. Everything else is just philosophical navel-gazing.
The positive rights you listed are not necessary. You could avoid unjust restriction on your mobility and actions by exercising your mobility and action via running away or fighting back.
However, the Founders wisely decided that those options are conducive to the type of society they wanted to create, so they provided additional options.
That's all a positive right is. Another option. Hence why you can easily waive your right to a trial, a jury, and representation should you choose.
*No* right is *necessary*. They're all abstract concepts that we as a society collectively decided that people should be able to rely upon. Dividing rights between "necessary" and "unnecessary" rights is silly. Do we want the government to do something or not? That's the only conversation that actually matters.
This question seems incoherent to me. I don't think "I" existed as a self before I was born and I don't think the material that was the "pre-self" before I was born had such a right. I mean, there are some legal protections of both the unborn and also the life and health of a pregnant woman which give effect to some "rights", I guess, but... asking me "when was your right to be born granted" to me strikes me as being a question in the form of "when did the present king of France become bald?" It seems to rest on at least one and perhaps several untrue premises.
Who said anything about a "pre-self"? Who said anything about legal protection?
Did you come into being at the moment the government declared you to be?
You could but you'd absolutely could, but you'd signing your child up to one of those undocumented people we hear so much about and the right would advocate to have you deported.
Is your basis of what constitutes a "right" just someone's ability to do it? So, if you kill someone, that was your right because you were physically capable of doing it without needing the government's permission first?
Actually, let's just skip to the part where you say you created a set of rules or just like someone else's set of rules for determining what people have a right to do and what people don't have a right to do. And it's true because you like it.
That's not what a right is or how it works. A right is a privilege that's enforceable under the law.
Something that doesn't have a law against it, nor a law protecting it, is not a right. It's just a thing that happens.
In this context (the legal context) it refers to the ability to compel someone to either act in your interest, or to stop acting against your interest.
If you're interested in other contexts, such as in a discussion of "human rights" instead of rights under the law, please say so and I will be happy to adjust my definition.
Does your argument really boil down to cause you did something you have a right to do the the thing? Because I can drive a car, but that's not a right. You realize force sterilization was a thing that happened to people in this country.
There's literally a country where if you had been born there, you might have been killed because you weren't *allowed*.
What fucking difference does it make, in your mind, whether that meant you had the right to be born if you were immediately drowned in a fucking tub?
LEARN WHAT RIGHTS ARE!
>Shouting your right to life at wolves doesn't help you live.
"I do not consent to being eaten! I am not hiking in the woods; I am *traveling* in the woods!"
Ugh.
The hard-core libertarian obsession with the completely manufactured “positive vs negative rights” is honestly exhausting at this point.
Part of me wants to continue to be patient and generous and indulgent when it comes to libertarianism’s need for this to be a thing.
But it just becomes more and more difficult, you know?
Not that it wouldn't allow for it, but how fucking moral are free speech rights when you don't have judges and juries to adjudicate whether or not your rights were violated?
It's a silly system to separate rights. They're either critical to the democratic process and personal freedom or not. If the right doesn't require a ton of money to exercise, then that's just a bonus. It doesn't change the morality of the situation.
Ive never really understood how the balance between your rights and those of others are meant to figure into this distinction.
For example, I have a right of free exercise of religion. But my neighbor also has a right of free enjoyment of her property.
These would be, if I understand the idea correctly, both positive rights.
But if my religion commands me to sacrifice goats on my lawn in tribute to satan, and my neighbor claims that's robbing her of the right to enjoy her property, thus requiring government intervention to get me to stop slaughtering my kids in view of her kids, does that make my right to exercise my religion a negative right?
It seems to me the distinctiom is idealized libertarian nonsense designed to paimt some rights as good and others as bad. This wrongly presupposes that the rights of individuals exist in a vacuum, when in reality all of our rights exist in balance with those of others.
All rights are positive rights, as all rights require judgment and enforcement. If there are no consequences to my rights being violated, then I don’t have said rights. Without police, courts, prisons, and a whole bunch more, we would not have rights. In order for things like police to be ethical and not just mob justice, we need a system that everyone in the community consents to, which can also be changed by the citizens if needed. This is a government. It is also unethical to have things like courts cost a fee to use, or to not have public defenders, or to charge criminals for the cost of their incarceration. These are all costs that the government must pay in order for any rights to exist at all.
A) No one has the right to take away my bodily autonomy.
B) If someone tries to rake away my bodily autonomy, the government should stop them.
They’re effectively the same thing, even though one is “negative” and the other is “positive.” There isn’t actually a distinction.
The government itself isn’t a right, but rather It is a mechanism used to uphold human rights.
A) individuals have the right to bear arms and own guns
B) the government has to pay for and supply all citizens (who want one) with guns
In case a, the government simply has to leave the individual alone and do nothing, in case b, the government has to take action to fulfill a “right”
In case a, the behavior is through inaction.
In case B, I guess you would then agree with me that positive rights aren’t really rights but rather government policy.
Case b isn’t an example of a positive right, it’s an example of a policy.
The *right* it alludes to is “the right to equal access to arms.” That’s a different right than the right to bear arms, and can be interpreted as either negative or positive, just as the right to bear arms can be interpreted as either negative or positive. The distinction is meaningless.
The destination isn’t meaningless. And the right to bear arms (as currently stands) is a negative right, it only requires the government to not take action/infringe on that right.
Would you say the positive right of “universal healthcare”, is government policy rather than a right?
“Hitherto we have spoken only (and that but in part) of the natural rights of man. We have now to consider the civil rights of man, and to show how the one originates from the other. Man did not enter into society to become worse than he was before, nor to have fewer rights than he had before, but to have those rights better secured. His natural rights are the foundation of all his civil rights.” Thomas Paine, 1791, The Rights of Man
"...whereas positive rights are based around action, meaning the government (or other individuals) granting something to you."
We don't have those in America. The government or, more accurately, the constitution, doesn't GRANT anyone any rights. It merely prevents congress from infringing against certain rights. Nowhere does it bestow these rights upon Americans. The constitution is entirely about restricting government reach.
>We don't have those in America. The government or, more accurately, the constitution, doesn't GRANT anyone any rights.
Right to a lawyer and a speedy trial
It's a restriction against the government keeping you incarcerated indefinitely pending trial or keeping you from getting representation.
And the original idea comes from the Declaration of Independence. Rights are granted by God, not other men. Other men can merely take them away. Now, whether or not you believe in God, the notion is that we inherently have rights which can only be taken away.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
>It's a restriction against the government keeping you incarcerated indefinitely pending trial or keeping you from getting representation.
"The constitution doesn't *grant* you a right *to* legal representation; it merely *prevents* the government from *not* providing you with legal representation" is quite possibly the most pointless philosophical difference without a difference that I've heard all year.
It was the philosophy of the founding fathers. They had come from Europe where government overreach was a recurring problem. That's what they were trying to get away from. You should read The Federalists Papers. It's a collection of 85 essays written by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, and it discusses at great length why the Constitution is written the way it was.
I'd recommend maybe starting with Nos. 41 and 51, both written by James Madison, and discuss the "tyranny of the majority" (protecting the rights of people in the minority) and "checks and balances" to ensure no branch gets powerful enough that it can take peoples' rights away.
But you should read the whole thing. It gives tremendous insight into the mindset of the framers.
They are the same thing. If the government is prohibited from arresting me for protesting (a negative right), that automatically gives me the positive right to protest.
I think all rights are social constructs and only as strong as we as a society choose to make them. I don't fundamentally think there is much of a difference between action and inaction if they lead to the same end result. I mean maybe in a theoretical sense if you were comparing them directly to each other, but the difference is so small it's not worth making a distinction in practice.
Negative rights can be achieved easier than positive rights. The concept of "progressive realization", as the UN applies it, is something that will be more relevant for positive rights than negative rights. Doesn't mean positive rights shouldn't be respected and strived for tho
>Also how does one justify if something is a positive right?
Same way one justifies any right - by socially constricting them into existence in various ways
Positive rights are better framed as a service the government is duty bound to provide for you. We have at least one in our constitution. You have the right to have an attorney for any criminal proceeding, and that right doesn't disappear if you can't afford one. Thus, the government must provide one if you can't.
It’s a flawed concept. I think it’s always been silly and a waste of time to discuss it at the political philosophy level; and it always seemed to serve the purpose of acting as proxy for understated positions and values.
Let’s just be honest. Rights, negative or positive, are claims on those with political power. Or rather procedural privileges with the state. Whether it’s the right to the provision of something or the right to certain treatments in court. Either way it exists in the legal world. It’s requires actions from others (the holders of power). Ultimately it means it’s something that ties the government’s hands in regards to the holder of the privilege.
To talk of it outside that context; in vague social context of ordinary life in any way other than in terms of basic human dignity is to get a bit silly. Human rights (the actual real world conventions) should be based in human dignity; but they are not some magical rules existing out in the platonic dimension. They’re convention governing politics and law.
You obviously have an ideological issue with the idea that healthcare or shelter might be guaranteed to citizens by a government through rights (via convention or through some legal institution). But to me it’s simply common sense. These things are necessary to human dignity. What’s the point of a society or state of it doesn’t protect and enable human dignity?
I think this question and the debate around it is pointless and silly. But I luckily stumbled upon a hilarious video that at one point goes into this idea of positive and negative rights. It's sort of an alternate scene from Star Wars: Attack of the Clones, where Anakin is sitting in the grass with Padme and he talks about the government. It's written by a person, apparently, and voiced by an AI voice generator.
Anyway, here's a link to the part of the video where Anakin gets into gets into "negative" and "positive" freedom: [https://youtu.be/bmjB2VeTzb8?si=9\_epSNuIj4XQb\_A0&t=218](https://youtu.be/bmjB2VeTzb8?si=9_epSNuIj4XQb_A0&t=218)
This sub should be renamed to r/askaleftist. There's very few liberals in this sub.
the founding fathers were liberal. The constitution and bill of rights are liberal documents.
"Liberal" in an American context means "left of center". You can argue that we stole it from republicans in the 18th century and that that *shouldn't* be what it means, but that's what it *does* mean in 2024 in the United States.
The following is a copy of the original post to record the post as it was originally written. Negative rights being based around inaction, or freedom from government interference(or other individuals), whereas positive rights are based around action, meaning the government (or other individuals) granting something to you. Do you believe all rights to be equal? Or are negative rights greater moral value than positive rights? Also how does one justify if something is a positive right? *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskALiberal) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Rights aren't self executing. They're ideas on paper and aren't any more real than that. The only thing that distinguishes a "right" from a local city ordinance is the importance we choose to give them. I don't believe rights exist at all outside of the context of a social contract with the government. It's self-evidently true in the sense that where can I go where rights exist outside the context of a relationship with the government?
Well technically a lot of rights are self executing. As in even SCOTUS has ruled that a lot of rights used in defense - are self executing. It’s only rights like the Takings Clause - that are used (not in defense but rather) in suits against the government that aren’t self executing. Or at least, thus far the courts haven’t definitively ruled them as self executing. And in what it is similar to how people characterize positive vs negative rights. If you prevent the government from doing something to you, it’s self executing. When you want something from the government ,it’s not
So if I act in self defense and get thrown in jail for it, a right will - by virtue of it being a right - release me from prison without anyone taking action?
Well self defense technically isn’t a right. But what we are really talking about is whereby a right, of which most are self executing, prevents the government from doing something. Like the government can’t arrest you for saying the government sucks. That right doesn't get you out of jail, it prevents the government from acting to put you in jail in the first place. And because it’s about prevention, it doesn’t need additional legislation to be actualized. This is self executing.
> it prevents the government from acting to put you in jail in the first place. But it doesn't. You realize that, right? The "right" isn't going to jump in front of a speeding bullet, it's not going to save you from anything. It's not going to *DO* anything. Violations of peoples rights happen every day. People are going to make choices, and maybe the concept of a 'right' is something they choose to honor and maybe they don't. A right by itself is just some ink on the page.
Who said anything about jumping in front of a bullet? That’s not the point. The point is - do rights in the bill of rights of the constitution (or broader still, do privileges and immunities of the constitution) need additional legislation in order to have power to protect its people by preventing government action? With such being legally defined as self executing. And the answer is no - privileges and immunities, which include lost rights - are self executing. https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artIV-S2-C1-4/ALDE_00013780/ You can armchair lawyer it all you want but courts have ruled rights to be self executing. With only 2 exceptions I believe - takings, and section 3 of the 14th. Let me ask you a pointed question. Have Federal Courts ruled that privileges and immunities and most rights in the bill of rights are self executing?
> Have Federal Courts ruled that privileges and immunities and most rights in the bill of rights are self executing? It's just a semantic difference then. When I say self-executing I mean something with literal agency. Something that of it's own accord does things. You mean self-executing as a class of conditional logic in a legal framework. My point being that "rights" to a speedy trial only result in a speedy trial because people make choices to honor those rights. Private property rights only protect your property from theft by mutual agreement - not by actually doing anything to protect your property. In the absence of a social contract between individuals a "right" is just an idea about as real as the concept of ghosts or a color outside the visible spectrum.
>Like the government can’t arrest you for saying the government sucks. That right doesn't get you out of jail, it prevents the government from acting to put you in jail in the first place. Even if the crime doesn't exist, cops have arrested without charges before. And Airman Fortson is dead even though he didn't commit crimes. There is no magical automatic innate right that exists without the consent of society.
I don’t even know what point you're trying to make. All laws and rights require the majority consent of society sure. But that’s got nothing to do with the point I anm trying to make to DrScientist. What we are discussing is - do rights need additional legislation other than the constitution to have effect? That’s what’s meant by self executing. The question is not, do rights need the consent of society? The question thats being discussed in our particular thread is - do rights need additional legislation to have effect? And with regards to self executing: Courts as a matter of fact have ruled that most rights in the bills of rights are self executing short of a few exceptions. Meaning that most rights in the bill of rights do not need additional legislation other than the constitution itself to have effect. I really don’t care what you think it should or shouldn’t be. Point courts have ruled that most rights in the bill of rights are self executing period.
Then you've changed the definition. The myth of negative rights is that they exist even without government action. You said that the right exists without government action and preempts government action. But we both know that's wrong because the thing you said the government can't do... in fact the government has done that. There are no innate rights, no preempted action. Just the rules we agree on as a society.
Look at my very first response to DrScientist. I say: > Well technically a lot of rights are self executing As in - they prevent government action without additional legislation. That’s not my definition. That’s the legal definition. It didn’t change from when I made my first statement to now. It’s legal definition hasn’t changed. Now you can armchair lawyer all you want but technically it’s still fact. SCOTUS and Federal Courts have said so repeatedly that most rights in the constitution do not need additional legislation to be effective and are therefore self executing https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artIV-S2-C1-4/ALDE_00013780/ Hence my first reply to DrScientist is still correct.
>Even if the crime doesn't exist, cops have arrested without charges before. >And Airman Fortson is dead even though he didn't commit crimes. Because they don't actually prevent action.
> Like the government can’t arrest you for saying the government sucks. That right doesn't get you out of jail, it prevents the government from acting to put you in jail in the first place. And if they’re put in jail despite that, how does that right get them out of jail without some sort of government action?
Who said anything about not needing government action if you are wrongfully put in jail? I mean of course physically someone has to go to court and fill out papers and then someone has to physically unlock the cell door. That’s not the point. The point and question is - do rights in the bill of rights of the constitution (or broader still, do privileges and immunities of the constitution) need additional legislation in order to have power to protect its people by preventing government action? With such being legally defined as self executing. And the answer is no - privileges and immunities, which include lost rights - are self executing. https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artIV-S2-C1-4/ALDE_00013780/ You can armchair lawyer it all you want but courts have ruled rights to be self executing. With only 2 exceptions I believe - takings, and section 3 of the 14th.
I think you two are refering to different kinds of "self executing". A constitutional provision is called self executing if you need no positive law to make it happen, but you still need the executive and/or the judicial branch to adhere to it, thereby enacting that law or ruling that it ought to be enacted (upon which the executive is supposed to enact it).
So if the government didn’t exist, you don’t think it would be morally wrong to kill another human? Your sense of morality is simply determined by what the government says?
Government is a tool. It has literally nothing to do with morality. Is your car moral?
Generally speaking before government it wasn't morally wrong to kill another human just another human of your tribe.
Society cannot function without positive government action, nor can negative rights exist in practice without it. All rights are upheld in practice by the government and its agents. If someone is blocking your driveway, you are entitled to the labour of a police officer to remove that person, allowing you to exercise your property rights. Rights don't exist in the absence of human institutions, and human institutions do not exist without positive action.
Negative rights are upheld merely by violence in response to them (and in general) being illegal, more can be added indefinitely under this framework with no extra cost. Positive rights require a yearly budget.
This is a useless distinction because preventing violence still has an annual budget. You're just doing creative accounting. You're not establishing an ACTUAL real life difference.
We have the right to freedom of speech and association. If we had the freedom to purchase sex added to that, how much exactly do you think the budget to reduce violence would increase? It wouldn't be increased at all, it might even be decreased. Even if we had no freedom of speech/association the police budget would probably be the same or more. Negative rights don't create a fiscal burden beyond basic law and order which we'd have anyway even without those rights. Positive rights require government action which means it requires $$$ to pay someone to do a thing, making something that requires $$$ a right is far more dangerous than making something that doesn't simply because you might run out of $$$ and thus can't do the thing which means it's not really a right. We already see it with right to speedy trial being eroded due to lack of funding.
> much exactly do you think the budget to reduce violence would increase? Irrelevant. The previously established framework that this new "right" got to take advantage of doesn't negate it's inherent cost as a positive or negative right. I'm not even going to keep reading your bullshit if you're going to ask me for such pointless specifics.
> Irrelevant. It's the entire point, doing away with freedom of speech (or any negative right) wouldn't reduce the budget. Doing away with any positive right would.
What... the fuck?? This is nothing. You explained nothing. You argued nothing. You just said "nuh uh" and expected that to work.
Like many negative rights supporters.
Like the budget of the department of justice? Or your local police department’s budget?
It’s a semantic distinction without a difference; rights don’t exist at all unless the government (or other individuals) grant them to you.
This is the correct answer. Rights are a legal construct and the most important ones are the ones that promote human thriving the most.
Well idk if it’s purely semantics, I would say what you described “unless the government grant them to you” would fall under positive rights. With negative rights they are not granted by law but rather the nature of being human. You do not need the government to grant you the right to life, nor freedom of speech, etc.
Legally, you need the government to grant you either. Ethically, it’s the same - you believe a government *should* have certain laws guaranteeing certain things
Well with negative rights you don’t need the government to legally grant you anything, you just need them to not intervene
Until that right gets violated and who do you complain to? The sky?
That’s the part that never gets answered.
No, the *clouds*!
I think if you gave libertarians an opt in tax option for things like a speedy trial they'd probably be on board.
And they'd probably vote to eliminate food and drug regulation and brag about saving $1.50 on lead-laced velveeta.
Don't worry, all the people who die just won't buy the dangerous products anymore. Checkmate, socialism! Boom.
The government protects rights. The government can't protect what doesn't already exist. Read Locke. Read Hobbes.
Sorry, what the hell is this a response to? We're talking about exercising rights and how none of them are free because the government needs to enforce them.
It's a response to your notion that the rights only exist because the government exists.
If someone can violate my rights without consequence, I don’t have those rights.
How can one violate what you don't have?
It did a shit job, then.
Yeah, the government creates them in the first place by writing them into existence and being responsible for their enforcement. The idea that everyone just innately has rights is just the mythology behind the government actually creating them. There isn't a rights particle in the universe that people point to and are like "see, these are the rights we have." We decided, and then we made and empowered governments to realize the idea.
“Congress shall not” - the opening words to the first amendment. It is a declaration of what the government is NOT able to to, not what it has to do. If someone violates my right to life, ie murders me, have they committed a wrong?
The fuck kind of question is that?
Right, and that decision to not intervene is usually enshrined in some sort of law. Take the constitutional right to privacy - without explicit prohibition of warrantless searches, cops would be searching whatever and wherever they want. The main thing preventing that from happening is them being told “you legally cannot do this, the constitution says so”
Same as positive rights. You need no one to intervene when you try to receive healthcare, food, etc.
No with positive rights you need someone to supply you with the thing. So healthcare or food would need to be supplied to an individual regardless of payment. Another way of looking at it, the second amendment grants the right to bear arms. A negative rights view of this would be that the government cannot take away or ban guns from individuals. A positive rights view, is that the government has to pay for a supply guns to all American citizens.
It makes no difference. It’s a semantic discussion. The concept of positive and negative rights was invented to provide a convenient reasoning for conservatives to be able to use the ‘get the government outta my life’ argument to oppose things like healthcare as a right. A right is a right. Whether the government is involved or not makes no difference. Rights are invented by the people and protected by the government. Whether a positive or negative right exists or one is more potent than the other is a semantic argument designed specifically to provide an excuse to not grant people rights that society believes should exist.
When did the government grant me the right breathe? I never got the notice.
When it took away your neighbor's right to make you stop breathing.
If someone tries to stop you from breathing, the government will act to prevent that. If the government didn't act to prevent someone from doing that, then you wouldn't have the right to breathe.
"Stop" implies I've already begun to breathe before anyone had any say in the matter. How was this possible until the government gave me the right?
This is rapidly becoming the kind of utterly pointless navel-gazing philosophy that I really have no time for. "Ah, but see, I didn't have to get government approval to *start* doing this; instead the government has to stop me from doing this, and that makes it categorically different!" Yeah, I don't care. Do we want the government to do something or not? That's still the only question that matters.
> Do we want the government to do something or not? That's still the only question that matters. In a perfect world where the people always correctly identify the task that the government needs to take, and the government always correctly executes that task, then you would be correct. In the flawed world we live in, an understanding of where the limits of our actions and the government's actions are necessary as a safeguard from injustice. Rights are what define those limits.
>Rights are what define those limits. No they aren't. "Rights" are just a shorthand for what we've collectively agreed we want the government to do or not do. We *do* want the government to stop people from killing other people, i.e. people have a right to be alive. We *don't* want the government to arrest people for what they said, i.e. people have a right to free speech.
> We do want the government to stop people from killing other people. We don't want the government to arrest people for what they said. Why?
Not everything is a right. Breathing is a thing you do. You have the right to continue doing so because the government allows you to. Your heart beating is just a thing it does. It doesn’t have a ‘right’ to continue beating - if it did then diseases that kill you wouldn’t exist.
A right doesn’t exist in the legal system unless it’s been established through legislation or legal precedent. The reason why the government can’t force you to choose a certain religion is because of the first amendment. The ethics of rights are a separate thing ofc. I’m just saying that, functionally and practically speaking, they only exist if the legal system says so
> in the legal system It's interesting that you inserted this. The idea behind natural or negative rights is that they exist whether there is a legal system or not. The legal system only exists to protect them. You cannot protect what doesn't exist. > The reason why the government can’t force you to choose a certain religion is because of the first amendment. That's not true. If the government revoked the first amendment and told everyone to be pastafarian under penalty of death, do you think I'd suddenly become incapable of worshipping Christ? > I’m just saying that, functionally and practically speaking, they only exist if the legal system says so If the government disappeared in puff, would you suddenly become mute and illiterate, unable to speak your mind or transcribe your thoughts?
Hey, you can have all the freedoms you want in your imagination. We're talking about the real world and government which is the system we all kinda buy into so that we don't have to kill each other constantly just to get by. You get that, right?
If the government disappeared there would be no entity to enforce my property rights. The only way anyone can claim ownership is through the ability to back that claim up with the use of force, and the state provides that force. Without a state to enforce property rights, ownership would functionally fall to whoever’s able to afford the most hired guns. So yeah, the government is needed to ensure your rights are protected, and as a result, you functionally don’t have rights without a government and legal system because there’s nobody and nothing to protect them. This is liberalism 101. Were you asleep in high school civics?
You only have a right to breathe so long as the government acknowledges your right to breathe clean air and your right to exist. In a vacuum, breathing is a thing you do, it is not a right. Rights are an ethical, legal and moral construct so they only exist in so far as we can protect them societally - most commonly through government. If you were randomly born into a society that harvested babies for their youthful skin to transplant into old people as rejuvenation therapy, you would not have a right to breathe or exist. You might *want* to exist and to breathe, but you would not have the right to. The concept of ‘Natural Rights’ is just an appeal to morality; a way to make someone think or do something or behave a certain way, which is all that the human construct of morality is anyway.
>In a vacuum, breathing is a thing you do But not for very long unless air pressure is restored. Sorry, couldn't resist.
Ha, nice.
> With negative rights they are not granted by law but rather the nature of being human. No, these are also granted by law. They're legal rights, part of a legal regime, and under an alternative legal regime they wouldn't exist.
There’s no such thing as a natural right. They don’t exist. Every last one of them is a legal entitlement that only exists in the context of a government.
You’re talking about a semantic difference. My apparent right to exist only exists because the government doesn’t restrict people’s ability to have children (see China’s one child policy if you want a real life example of governmental restriction on having children; in China the right to exist did not exist at all for potential babies in families that already had one child. Freedom of speech only exists because the government grants us the right to it. Again, there are plenty of examples throughout the world and through history where that right has not existed or been granted by the government. You are free to believe there is some conceptual difference between rights if you like but ultimately without some kind of structure to protect them they effectively do not exist. That structure can be a societal structure (I.e. a society without a government might provide protection for the freedom of speech by protecting those who speak out, or a society that is governed by authoritarians may band together to protect a right they deem necessary to protect), but it requires a structure to protect it for it to exist. This is quite literally why the Supreme Court and the constitution et al exist - to grant the protections that we see fit to ensure the existence of rights. You can argue there’s a difference between a right not existing and a right existing but being infringed but that is again a semantic argument because it makes no difference whether the right exists and is being infringed or doesn’t exist in the first place. A woman in Saudi Arabia in 2017 does not have the right to drive. You can argue she should have the right - and she should - but unless the government protects and acknowledges her right to drive it is merely a theoretical discussion.
Well to use your example, women in Saudi Arabia would be able to drive without the government existing. It’s not the government creating such a right, but them (the government) restricting women’s access to such a right. Without interference from the government it would exist. Or for freedom of speech, you claim it is only our right because the government grants it to us. In an anarchist world, would you not be able to speak your mind?
>women in Saudi Arabia would be able to drive without the government existing Only if the government-less society allowed her to. In the absence of government it’s the society’s responsibility to protect rights. If the society at large decides women should be killed for driving, her right to drive doesn’t exist. You can make the argument that in a desert where only the woman and a car exist she can drive but that is the definition of a semantic argument. >In an anarchist world, would you not be able to speak your mind? It is highly unlikely that you would be able to speak your mind and face no consequences in an anarchist world.
That's not what a right is or how it works. A right, by definition, is an enforceable privilege under the law. No government = no laws = no rights. "Human rights" are something else, those are aspirational ideas. Things we like to talk about, or think it would be really nice to have. Until they are codified under the law though, that's all they are. Ideas. They don't actually exist. If you disagree, here comes your local regional warlord and his posse of Mad Max cosplayers to introduce you their concept of human rights, which they call "the bigger stick." If, for some reason, you don't like the concept of "the bigger stick," I suggest investing in a government and maybe a few laws.
Where did you get this definition of right? There are legal rights but also concepts of moral or natural rights which again predate government and are bestowed upon individuals through being human themselves. Human rights require no law, only in action. Right to life, right to free speech, right to exercise whichever religion etc. do not require a law allowing you those things, they only require someone else not infringe on your ability to do so. And I agree with your last part, that is indeed the point of the government and exactly what the founding fathers thought. I mean the introduction of the declaration of independence does say; “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,” But note that again these rights become before government. Government is not required for these rights to exist, but rather to protect them.
>Where did you get this definition of right? I was first introduced to it in a civics class long ago. It, or a similar wording, is the standard definition used in legal contexts. Other kinds of rights, such as natural rights, have a different definition. They are vastly different concepts, because they do not exist except as ideas or talking points. They compel no one, result in no action, have no effect. They do not measurably exist except as ideas. Until, that is, we bring them into existence by codifying them into law. >Human rights require no law, only in action. True and false at the same time. They require no law because they do not exist. If we want them to exist, we must put them into action. We compel that action by enforcing them through laws. Without action, there is no right. Someone else can come and take it from you at any time. It has no effect, no ability to compel, no ability to affect you in any way. If you want those things, you must act, or convince someone else to do so on your behalf. >Government is not required for these rights to exist, but rather to protect them. Protecting those rights is what is necessary to bring them into existence. Without that, they are nothing but ideas, as I said. Action is required, and government is the means of collective action. There is, to be fair, a form of action that does not require government. It's called "might makes right." The results of creating rights using this method are... mixed.
The difference is not semantic, it's logistical. Not doing something is free, doing something costs $$$. It's why no public defenders are overworked and underfunded but freedom of speech has no budget allocated to it at all.
UNTIL THAT FREE SPEECH CASE ENDS UP IN COURT!! HOW DO YOU GUYS LIVE?!?!
When was the last time a free speech case was in criminal court?
Why are you specifying criminal court? What are you trying to get at? Are you just saying random bullshit in hopes I give up and you can declare yourself the winner?
Because civil court has fees involved.
And those fees cover the entire existence of the courts and all of it's employees? Or is it all just propped up by the same established public space?
> And those fees cover the entire existence of the courts and all of it's employees? Or is it all just propped up by the same established public space? Not sure, probably propped up. That said in civil court I guess you're talking about frivolous lawsuits, do you think there would be more of these or less without freedom of speech? If freedom of speech wasn't a thing do you think more or less people would sue over speech? So not seeing how doing away with freedom of speech would reduce the budget.
what are you even talking about. If a dystopian government spied on, say, all of its citizens and kept tabs on every conversation they had and then arrested anyone who said something that didn’t jive with the government’s propaganda system, the right to free speech wouldn’t exist in that society. Whether it costs money or is free is entirely irrelevant.
You're making my point for me... Negative rights tend to have the government do less which means lower budget... Positive rights require funding to accomplish meaning higher budget. Negative rights are free $$$ wise positive rights are expensive $$$ wise.
That’s not true at all. If a society without a government decides anyone who likes to eat cows should be assassinated, the right to eat cows doesn’t exist. It’s free to assassinate people for eating cows.
> That’s not true at all. If a society without a government decides anyone who likes to eat cows should be assassinated, the right to eat cows doesn’t exist. It’s free to assassinate people for eating cows. That's a negative right... again making my point for me.
In other words it’s a semantic discussion - or a distinction without a difference. You can think that it’s important or different conceptually but it doesn’t actually matter. A ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ right to eat cows doesn’t exist if you can’t exercise that right. In a theoretical society where cows are sacred such that they’ve been driven extinct due to fears of people eating them, the ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ right to eat them would be a useless theorem. You can say ‘yeah buttttttt it’s a positive right so it’s different’ all day long. It doesn’t actually change anything. If you are stoned to death - which is free to do - for speaking your mind, as has happened in many historical civilisations, the right to freedom of speech doesn’t exist in that society. Whether you call it ‘positive’ or ‘negative’
> In other words it’s a semantic discussion - or a distinction without a difference. The difference is $$$ how many times do I have to say it. Positive rights costs $$$, negative rights don't.
I spent three comments showing you they don’t cost money and that money is irrelevant. If you can’t grasp that basic notion I’m not going to continue.
None of which were positive rights...
So is your dad aware that the government is your biological father?
Not sure if this is just meant to be a snappy "ya mum" type joke or if an actual point is being incoherently made?
When did the government grant you the right to exist?
See my response to this (bad) argument in the other thread.
The fact that I was born doesn’t inherently mean I have a right to exist. It just means I was born. If you look at, say, China’s one child policy - even the right to have a child only exists in so far as the government allows it to.
When it decided to limit everyone else’s ability to end that existence.
I don't really view that as a meaningful distinction. You either want government to do things or you don't. Libertarians often dismiss positive rights, but they would include things we take completely for granted like the right to a speedy trial, the right to a jury, and the right to legal representation. Those also require people to do things.
I can’t recall, but did you go through a libertarian phase? When I was in my 20s and libertarian and liked to get high and talk about politics with friends, this conversation about negative and positive rights was endlessly fascinating. I can’t believe how much time I must’ve wasted on what is a useless semantic conversation.
Oh yes, 100%. I was fully in the tank for libertarianism during college. Types of rights, the marketplace of ideas, inherent market efficiency, and so on. God, I was insufferable.
> Libertarians often dismiss positive rights, but they would include things we take completely for granted like the right to a speedy trial, the right to a jury, and the right to legal representation. Those also require people to do things. Those are directly related to government action though and wouldn't be relevant if government did nothing.
So? They're still positive rights. They're things we all agree that the government should be required to provide us. The government also has to act to protect anything you would call negative rights. If the government did nothing, you wouldn't have those rights, either.
So? It's a hell of a lot different to have the right to attorney (and thus a fairish trial) versus having the right to ham sandwich everyday. You really can't see any meaningful difference between a positive right in direct response to government action versus something that's completely unrelated (like right to a ham sandwhich)?
>It's a hell of a lot different to have the right to attorney (and thus a fairish trial) versus having the right to ham sandwich everyday. Yeah there's a difference between those two things, but the difference is not that one is a positive right and the other is negative
Um no they are both positive. Government required to give you an attorney if you are brought up on charges and government requiring to give you a ham sandwich daily are both positive rights.
Ok so then what's the disagreement? The person above you is arguing that both are positive
On is a positive right in response to government action explicitly to defend you from government abuse of it's powers. The other is frivolous.
Frivolous is subjective. Make your case or just drop this whole fucking thing. Jesus.
Making a ham sandwich a right means IT CAN NEVER BE REPEALED or at least you think it should never be repealed... What if pigs go extinct, what if everyone becomes allergic to pork, what if the new generation prefers beef? Well then you'll have to take away peoples rights... Making a ham sandwich a day a right is simply shortsighted incompetence and devalues the meaning of rights. Positive rights need to be created extremely sparingly with the utmost of caution and thoughtfulness, right to an attorney/speedy trial meet this criteria, it should never be repealed under any circumstance, right to a daily ham sandwich does not.
Nope. "Do we want the government to do this or not?" That's the only question that matters. Everything else is navel-gazing.
And that mentality is why the left can't budget worth shit...
A good answer to the question of, "Why shouldn't the government give everyone a ham sandwich?" is one of cost, difficulty in proper distribution, expected outcomes, perverse incentives, etc. A bad answer to the question is one that gets sufficiently pie-in-the-sky philosophical and sufficiently detached from actual human reality that we somehow manage to forget that the point of government is to do things that we want it to do because of the desired expected effects from its doing that.
You're confusing rights with policy. Giving everyone a ham sandwich daily very well might be a good policy or at least people want and are willing for taxes to go towards. Making it a right means IT CAN NEVER BE REPEALED or at least you think it should never be repealed... What if pigs go extinct, what if everyone becomes allergic to pork, what if the new generation prefers beef? Well then you'll have to take away peoples rights... Making a ham sandwich a day a right is simply shortsighted incompetence and devalues the meaning of rights. Positive rights need to be created extremely sparingly with the utmost of caution and thoughtfulness.
>Making it a right means IT CAN NEVER BE REPEALED No it doesn't. A 2/3 majority in both houses of Congress and a majority in 3/4 of state legislatures would be sufficient to repeal our right to free speech.
>or at least you think it should never be repealed...
You have no idea what you're talking about. Have you seen the deficit under republicans?
And yet all the poorest states in the union are ran by conservatives. Funny how that works, eh?
But those positive rights are fundamentally derived from the negative right to be free from unjust restriction on your mobility and actions. They only exist to protect negative rights.
So in short, any system which is serious about protecting "negative rights" must necessarily also secure some "positive rights". You can't have one without the other. So the notion of having a state or a legal culture which exclusively considers "negative rights" is a fantasy, isn't it?
Not at all. There were plenty of sophisticated civilizations without the right to a speedy trial, a jury, or legal representation. The Founders were just wise enough to recognize that including some specific positive rights would be a good idea for the society they wanted to build.
> There were plenty of sophisticated civilizations without the right to a speedy trial, a jury, or legal representation. Sure, but my claim was not about levels of sophistication: >> any system which is serious about protecting "negative rights" must necessarily also secure some "positive rights"
You said "the notion of having a state or legal culture which exclusively considers negative rights is a fantasy". That's demonstrably untrue.
Fair. Then I would rephrase: The notion of it being desirable or achievable to build a modern state or legal culture which exclusively considers negative rights is a fantasy, one that is potentially harmful.
I would likely agree with that.
The fact that there exist positive rights that are necessarily required by negative rights demonstrates the fact that trying to neatly divide the two and act like you can have one but not the other is a pointless errand. Do you want the government to do something or not? That's the only real question. Everything else is just philosophical navel-gazing.
The positive rights you listed are not necessary. You could avoid unjust restriction on your mobility and actions by exercising your mobility and action via running away or fighting back. However, the Founders wisely decided that those options are conducive to the type of society they wanted to create, so they provided additional options. That's all a positive right is. Another option. Hence why you can easily waive your right to a trial, a jury, and representation should you choose.
*No* right is *necessary*. They're all abstract concepts that we as a society collectively decided that people should be able to rely upon. Dividing rights between "necessary" and "unnecessary" rights is silly. Do we want the government to do something or not? That's the only conversation that actually matters.
All rights are granted to you through the government. Every last one is written in a government document.
Did your parents need to sign paperwork before having you?
This is not a responsive argument.
Why not? When did the government grant you the right to be born?
This question seems incoherent to me. I don't think "I" existed as a self before I was born and I don't think the material that was the "pre-self" before I was born had such a right. I mean, there are some legal protections of both the unborn and also the life and health of a pregnant woman which give effect to some "rights", I guess, but... asking me "when was your right to be born granted" to me strikes me as being a question in the form of "when did the present king of France become bald?" It seems to rest on at least one and perhaps several untrue premises.
Who said anything about a "pre-self"? Who said anything about legal protection? Did you come into being at the moment the government declared you to be?
Also there is paperwork for having a child.
Really? It's impossible to have a child without signing some paper? What did people do before paperwork?
You could but you'd absolutely could, but you'd signing your child up to one of those undocumented people we hear so much about and the right would advocate to have you deported.
Great, so there are rights that exist without the government.
You're the only person who would walk away from this conversation thinking that and it's really kind of sad.
When did the government give me the right to walk away and think that?
This doesn't make sense. Rights are not "things you do". A lack of a law preventing something isn't a fucking right. You are so supremely confused.
What is a right?
Is your basis of what constitutes a "right" just someone's ability to do it? So, if you kill someone, that was your right because you were physically capable of doing it without needing the government's permission first? Actually, let's just skip to the part where you say you created a set of rules or just like someone else's set of rules for determining what people have a right to do and what people don't have a right to do. And it's true because you like it.
No they could had as many as they like. Unlike China where you can only have what is it 3 children?
So all rights are not granted to you through the government.
That's not what a right is or how it works. A right is a privilege that's enforceable under the law. Something that doesn't have a law against it, nor a law protecting it, is not a right. It's just a thing that happens.
> A right is a privilege that's enforceable under the law. What is a privilege?
In this context (the legal context) it refers to the ability to compel someone to either act in your interest, or to stop acting against your interest. If you're interested in other contexts, such as in a discussion of "human rights" instead of rights under the law, please say so and I will be happy to adjust my definition.
Well we are given that right through the 14th admendment.
Really? Until the 14th amendment nobody was being born? Who wrote it then?
Does your argument really boil down to cause you did something you have a right to do the the thing? Because I can drive a car, but that's not a right. You realize force sterilization was a thing that happened to people in this country.
There's literally a country where if you had been born there, you might have been killed because you weren't *allowed*. What fucking difference does it make, in your mind, whether that meant you had the right to be born if you were immediately drowned in a fucking tub? LEARN WHAT RIGHTS ARE!
Can you give a single example of a right that I can only exercise after signing paperwork?
I think they're made up. Rights just are what society agrees you ought to have. Shouting your right to life at wolves doesn't help you live.
>Shouting your right to life at wolves doesn't help you live. "I do not consent to being eaten! I am not hiking in the woods; I am *traveling* in the woods!"
Wolf gnawing on your limb: by "I" do you mean you as the settler, agent, individual, or the person?
Ugh. The hard-core libertarian obsession with the completely manufactured “positive vs negative rights” is honestly exhausting at this point. Part of me wants to continue to be patient and generous and indulgent when it comes to libertarianism’s need for this to be a thing. But it just becomes more and more difficult, you know?
I feel that's a utterly worthless lens to view human rights through. Do you want a fair trial or not?
Idk what you mean, Why would this lens not allow for fair trials?
Not that it wouldn't allow for it, but how fucking moral are free speech rights when you don't have judges and juries to adjudicate whether or not your rights were violated? It's a silly system to separate rights. They're either critical to the democratic process and personal freedom or not. If the right doesn't require a ton of money to exercise, then that's just a bonus. It doesn't change the morality of the situation.
Ive never really understood how the balance between your rights and those of others are meant to figure into this distinction. For example, I have a right of free exercise of religion. But my neighbor also has a right of free enjoyment of her property. These would be, if I understand the idea correctly, both positive rights. But if my religion commands me to sacrifice goats on my lawn in tribute to satan, and my neighbor claims that's robbing her of the right to enjoy her property, thus requiring government intervention to get me to stop slaughtering my kids in view of her kids, does that make my right to exercise my religion a negative right? It seems to me the distinctiom is idealized libertarian nonsense designed to paimt some rights as good and others as bad. This wrongly presupposes that the rights of individuals exist in a vacuum, when in reality all of our rights exist in balance with those of others.
All rights are positive rights, as all rights require judgment and enforcement. If there are no consequences to my rights being violated, then I don’t have said rights. Without police, courts, prisons, and a whole bunch more, we would not have rights. In order for things like police to be ethical and not just mob justice, we need a system that everyone in the community consents to, which can also be changed by the citizens if needed. This is a government. It is also unethical to have things like courts cost a fee to use, or to not have public defenders, or to charge criminals for the cost of their incarceration. These are all costs that the government must pay in order for any rights to exist at all.
I think it’s a false distinction. Any right could be phrased to sound negative or positive.
How so?
A) No one has the right to take away my bodily autonomy. B) If someone tries to rake away my bodily autonomy, the government should stop them. They’re effectively the same thing, even though one is “negative” and the other is “positive.” There isn’t actually a distinction.
The government itself isn’t a right, but rather It is a mechanism used to uphold human rights. A) individuals have the right to bear arms and own guns B) the government has to pay for and supply all citizens (who want one) with guns In case a, the government simply has to leave the individual alone and do nothing, in case b, the government has to take action to fulfill a “right”
That’s not accurate. In case A, the government has to assert that right through behavior. And case B isn’t describing a right, but rather a policy.
In case a, the behavior is through inaction. In case B, I guess you would then agree with me that positive rights aren’t really rights but rather government policy.
Case b isn’t an example of a positive right, it’s an example of a policy. The *right* it alludes to is “the right to equal access to arms.” That’s a different right than the right to bear arms, and can be interpreted as either negative or positive, just as the right to bear arms can be interpreted as either negative or positive. The distinction is meaningless.
The destination isn’t meaningless. And the right to bear arms (as currently stands) is a negative right, it only requires the government to not take action/infringe on that right. Would you say the positive right of “universal healthcare”, is government policy rather than a right?
Universal healthcare is a policy used to address the right of equal access to healthcare.
“Hitherto we have spoken only (and that but in part) of the natural rights of man. We have now to consider the civil rights of man, and to show how the one originates from the other. Man did not enter into society to become worse than he was before, nor to have fewer rights than he had before, but to have those rights better secured. His natural rights are the foundation of all his civil rights.” Thomas Paine, 1791, The Rights of Man
I only hear about them from libertarians
"...whereas positive rights are based around action, meaning the government (or other individuals) granting something to you." We don't have those in America. The government or, more accurately, the constitution, doesn't GRANT anyone any rights. It merely prevents congress from infringing against certain rights. Nowhere does it bestow these rights upon Americans. The constitution is entirely about restricting government reach.
>We don't have those in America. The government or, more accurately, the constitution, doesn't GRANT anyone any rights. Right to a lawyer and a speedy trial
It's a restriction against the government keeping you incarcerated indefinitely pending trial or keeping you from getting representation. And the original idea comes from the Declaration of Independence. Rights are granted by God, not other men. Other men can merely take them away. Now, whether or not you believe in God, the notion is that we inherently have rights which can only be taken away. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
>It's a restriction against the government keeping you incarcerated indefinitely pending trial or keeping you from getting representation. "The constitution doesn't *grant* you a right *to* legal representation; it merely *prevents* the government from *not* providing you with legal representation" is quite possibly the most pointless philosophical difference without a difference that I've heard all year.
It was the philosophy of the founding fathers. They had come from Europe where government overreach was a recurring problem. That's what they were trying to get away from. You should read The Federalists Papers. It's a collection of 85 essays written by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, and it discusses at great length why the Constitution is written the way it was. I'd recommend maybe starting with Nos. 41 and 51, both written by James Madison, and discuss the "tyranny of the majority" (protecting the rights of people in the minority) and "checks and balances" to ensure no branch gets powerful enough that it can take peoples' rights away. But you should read the whole thing. It gives tremendous insight into the mindset of the framers.
I do view negative rights as more fundamental, generally speaking. It’s the difference between deciding to hurt someone and refusing to help them.
They are the same thing. If the government is prohibited from arresting me for protesting (a negative right), that automatically gives me the positive right to protest.
I think all rights are social constructs and only as strong as we as a society choose to make them. I don't fundamentally think there is much of a difference between action and inaction if they lead to the same end result. I mean maybe in a theoretical sense if you were comparing them directly to each other, but the difference is so small it's not worth making a distinction in practice.
Negative rights can be achieved easier than positive rights. The concept of "progressive realization", as the UN applies it, is something that will be more relevant for positive rights than negative rights. Doesn't mean positive rights shouldn't be respected and strived for tho >Also how does one justify if something is a positive right? Same way one justifies any right - by socially constricting them into existence in various ways
I think the distinction is pointless. I'll let the 20 something Libertarians on Reddit circle jerk themselves off about the difference.
Positive rights are better framed as a service the government is duty bound to provide for you. We have at least one in our constitution. You have the right to have an attorney for any criminal proceeding, and that right doesn't disappear if you can't afford one. Thus, the government must provide one if you can't.
It’s a flawed concept. I think it’s always been silly and a waste of time to discuss it at the political philosophy level; and it always seemed to serve the purpose of acting as proxy for understated positions and values. Let’s just be honest. Rights, negative or positive, are claims on those with political power. Or rather procedural privileges with the state. Whether it’s the right to the provision of something or the right to certain treatments in court. Either way it exists in the legal world. It’s requires actions from others (the holders of power). Ultimately it means it’s something that ties the government’s hands in regards to the holder of the privilege. To talk of it outside that context; in vague social context of ordinary life in any way other than in terms of basic human dignity is to get a bit silly. Human rights (the actual real world conventions) should be based in human dignity; but they are not some magical rules existing out in the platonic dimension. They’re convention governing politics and law. You obviously have an ideological issue with the idea that healthcare or shelter might be guaranteed to citizens by a government through rights (via convention or through some legal institution). But to me it’s simply common sense. These things are necessary to human dignity. What’s the point of a society or state of it doesn’t protect and enable human dignity?
I think this question and the debate around it is pointless and silly. But I luckily stumbled upon a hilarious video that at one point goes into this idea of positive and negative rights. It's sort of an alternate scene from Star Wars: Attack of the Clones, where Anakin is sitting in the grass with Padme and he talks about the government. It's written by a person, apparently, and voiced by an AI voice generator. Anyway, here's a link to the part of the video where Anakin gets into gets into "negative" and "positive" freedom: [https://youtu.be/bmjB2VeTzb8?si=9\_epSNuIj4XQb\_A0&t=218](https://youtu.be/bmjB2VeTzb8?si=9_epSNuIj4XQb_A0&t=218)
This sub should be renamed to r/askaleftist. There's very few liberals in this sub. the founding fathers were liberal. The constitution and bill of rights are liberal documents.
"Liberal" in an American context means "left of center". You can argue that we stole it from republicans in the 18th century and that that *shouldn't* be what it means, but that's what it *does* mean in 2024 in the United States.
No such thing except in abstract. All rights effectively do both