The problem I frequently encounter in political and moral discussions is people want to conflate usefulness with individual rights.
It's useful to point a gun at someone and extort them of money to fund cancer research but that does not make it moral. Rights cannot impose an obligation upon others to fulfill that right therefore healthcare, public education, child support are not rights.
You do not have a right to someone’s charity or sacrifice. Believing so opens up the door to chaos and being able to make claims upon each other at will based on one’s sense of entitlement. If a law or a right takes something from you i.e. your life, your property or your liberty, it is not a moral law and thus it is just to oppose it.
As Thomas Jefferson aptly put, rights are “Unobstructed action to our will within the limits drawn around us by the equal RIGHTS of others”.
The idea being that we all may want things in society however neither of us has the right to initiate force or aggression to get these things. Our goals need to be accomplished through voluntary interaction. This is the defining distinction between individualist philosophies and collectivist philosophies. One is certainly acting morally when risking his/her life to save someone or give to charity. That is what we call altruism. However, forcing someone to do these things whether it is directly or through the proxy of government no longer becomes altruism but rather a perversion of good.
Forced obligations like this are what you call positive rights. Rights are always defined in the negative, meaning they do not require you to sacrifice yourself or do not infringe on another’s right. In other words, it is not someone’s right to have you save them unless you have contractually or explicitly taken it upon yourself to do so i.e. you are their guardian.
We all feel a sense of guilt when we have the power to prevent a wrongdoing but do nothing, and in my honest opinion, it says something about your character if you allow horrible things to be done around you that you have the capacity to prevent. However, this is very different to an active form of violence such as assault, rape, murder, theft, fraud etc.
If passive violence and positive rights are valid, you're responsible for anything short of enlisting to go fight on the front lines of every injustice around the world. This is a chaotic worldview that is rejected in The Non-Aggression Principle, Libertarianism and other individualist philosophies as it’s practical world applications are untenable.
Examples of Positive Rights are
Universal Health Care
Public Schooling
Anti-discrimination Laws
Forced Vaccination
Anti Abortion Laws
Compelled Speech Laws
Boom chakalaka
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit