As with all positive rights, I deeply disagree with the idea that housing is a human right, because it means someone is obligated (perhaps even enslaved) to provide you that right.
All rights are positive rights in that sense. Some are more expensive to provide than others though. Every single right on planet earth relies on the work of others to enforce.
Including what naive libertarians call "negative rights" like freedom of speech or property rights.
That poorly thought out distinction muddles the discussion unnecessarily.
It's mostly about what set of responsibilities is appropriate to assign to each individual and their organizations, the cost/benefit of each responsability you add, etc.
Negative rights are valid and undisturbed even when you're alone on a desert island. Positive rights always taking something from somebody else without requiring their consent.
Why is the distinction poorly thought out? It seems to me that the "right to life" is "you shouldn't take my life", similarly "you shouldn't take my property", and "you shouldn't block my pursuit of happiness" unless those things infringe upon other people's equal rights in those areas.
Whereas "right to housing" or "healthcare" seems to me "you should give me a house or healthcare". At the very least, that is what most people seem to mean by those things.
“You shouldn’t take my property” is a wish, not a right. Unless it imposes a responsibility to society to defend your property, it’s not actually a right. That takes money, that’s why we have judges, courts, police officers, and more, to enforce your right to property.
You are all sorts of wrong about this. It being a right means you have the right to defend it. Certainly it is nicer for most people to live in a society that imposes taxes to provide a public good like police protection (which police protection generally is; even if you tried to have people opt in to police protection and excluded those that haven't, they are still free riding off the general order and lack of stray gunfire that are pretty much nonexclusionary unless you are going to use force to move people geographically). Some libertarians might disagree even with taxes for recognized public goods, but even if they do, there is still a huge difference between the coercion needed to fund police protection and enforcement and the level of coercion needed to force people to provide goods and services to other people to enforce their positive rights.
Another way to look at it would be in an utopia, you wouldn't have to do anything to protect natural rights. People would just not infringe on them. For positive rights, it requires violating people's negative rights to enforce them. It just doesn't make sense as a concept.
I don't think you have this right. It may be true that every right has an enforcement cost, but it is still possible to draw a distinction between positive and negative rights. These are different kinds of costs. In a society composed of two people, one person's right to housing clearly imposes a different and greater cost on the other than a right not to be killed.
I don't think it imposes a responsibility on society per se. It imposes a responsibility on other people (which I suppose you can argue is "society", which is, after all, just lots of other people) to not take those things. Rights don't imply enforcement, they imply morality.
Once you see everything as violence, either offensive of defensive, nothing is really a right. Either the people with power decide liberty is good, or they don’t. Freedom isn’t “natural”. It’s a discretion of power.
In this world, there is nothing that means anything. There are only chemical reactions overwhelming other chemical reactions. I refuse to live in this world.
You own nothing. If an gang kicked you out of your house and squated there, what could you do? If the police wouldn’t come at kick them out, nothing. When the police were told not to evict people during covid, that is essentially what happened.
You need a gang. That gang can decide that the title to your property entitled you to having armed men enforce your claim, but it’s that force which allows you to “own” the property.
Politics is about making sure a gang that shares your values of how society should be organized has a monopoly in force.
It depends a great deal on whether it's a right held merely against the government or against humanity in general.
A negative right against the government merely ensures the government won't do certain things to you so in that sense it doesn't obligate anyone to do anything. Ofc in practice it doesn't guarantee much either since nothing forces the government to step in and prevent gangs of armed thugs from beating you up if you say the wrong thing.
So I don't think the distinction is useless, it's just that many of the most cherished libertarian rights (freedom from violence etc) are also positive rights.
Even if that is true, saying housing is a human right is not saying much. In college in the 1970's we lived 4 to a small dorm room. Abraham lived in tents, do tents count?
Same with medical care and food. A huge % of the benefit of healthcare comes from vaccinations alone. so do people have a right to more than vaccinations? How about vaccinations, trauma care, and infant care only?
Food, a diet based on fortified hard tack will keep one alive at very low cost.
I don’t actually disagree with you. I prefer to think of rights in terms of responsibilities.
Regarding what a right to housing could entail, in a poor society providing a tent to sleep in could be what’s reasonable for that society to absorb (in many nothing might be what’s reasonable!). In a society that’s better off, perhaps providing access to homeless shelters would be the best.
In a very wealthy society, perhaps more would be reasonable. I don’t think discussing it in abstract broad terms is productive at all.
I think you do have to have abstract discussion on what is right and wrong (morality, not "rights"). I think that morally speaking, rights are meaningless, and it's all about the responsibilities we have to other people (and to ourselves). But rights are the best formulation I've seen in terms of coming up with an intuitive enforcement mechanism with inbuilt incentives.
And that terrifying prospect seems most likely to be implemented if "housing is a human right" wins the day at the ballot box. Live in the pod, eat the bugs, because that's all that you can afford!
In New York, the answer to the question seems to be "housing is a human right, but we can't afford to house all of these migrants, so we're going to change the rules and say that housing is NOT a human right". Pods were apparently not considered. Presumably, the Pods approach would have been bad optics for those people who think that people have a "right" to better housing than a Pod, but if the alternative is homelessness, I would respectfully disagree.
Maybe. There seems to be a big YIMBY push that seems to be coded "progressive" (though it, of course, appeals to libertarians and to those republicans who actually support property rights). When there are actual problems that everyone can see, you can sometimes get people to support solutions which would actually fix those problems. Sometimes. YIMBYs have gotten some regulations changed in the right direction, even in New York. Of course, there ARE limits; I highly doubt that anywhere in the US will go as far as to completely abolish zoning or eliminate minimum apartment sizes.
In re declaring something a “human right”, presumably to be provided by the government, the question should always be asked: “are you prepared to use violence to take the item in question to give it to your intended recipient?“
Err ... , so you say, if you do not pay your taxes in the US, the IRS just shrugs nowadays? Al Capone went to prison for tax-evasion, I recall. Highways, FDA, police, moon-landings, F-35s - all state provided - and yeah, the money to provide for that item is taken from you and given to the intended resp. unintended recipients. If you comply, no "violence" is used, ofc.. If not: good luck! Libertarianism 101, ;) I assumed Caplan-readers are already in the know.
In an emergency - West-Germany after WWII - millions of ppl were indeed put into other ppls houses, too: 1946-1968, google the fine German word: Wohnraumbewirtschaftungsgesetz - The UN in their Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) declared 1948 in §25: "1. Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care" For whatever that means.
Every once in awhile some idiot gets the idea that he won't pay his taxes and will whole up in his house when they send agents to collect. Either they manage to take him by force without hurting him or he gets killed.
Another question could be "who's going to use violence in order to prevent someone else from using violence against you." Those same police that will take your tax dollars by force also prevent randos from just murdering you and living in your house.
The process of identifying an expanding universe of "human rights" seems to have become a growth industry. This tendency has diluted the impact of the core rights that the original advocates for individual human dignity promoted. Subtle distinctions in language do matter. "Rights" too easily elide into "entitlements". Restoring focus on human "liberties" should be the objective. Freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religious observation etc are universal and indivisible human rights that all can enjoy without restricting the liberties of others or imposing specific costs upon them. Those who advocate specifc individual cosmic entitlements to housing, education etc are seeking to elevate mundane policy matters to a higher plane, no doubt in order to advance particular policies becaue they all necessitate transfers of resources. At the end of the day, housing outcomes are the result of complex and diverse decisions as to the allocation of scarce resources. To the extent that these are driven, on the one hand, by markets and, on the other hand, by planning and redistributive policy (and, if so, in what manner and to what extent) is surely just part of the argey-bargey of the political process.
No one, even on the left, believes in a literal right to housing, or health care, or any specific commodity or service. I could explain that, but maybe I'd better write it up myself instead.
As much as the Left (and increasingly, the Right) repeats this mantra; and as frequently as they show themselves willing simply to take from one to give to another, by force if necessary, I’m inclined to take them at their word.
Rights are not a political value any longer. Its straight sacrifice. You dont have a right to X. The "owner" of X has a "duty" to give it to you. The mainstream interpretation of the Constitution is that its a method of unlimited majority rule (limited only by arbitrarily selected concrete traditions. No principles need apply).
During my time in middle school and high school, I have heard many arguments in favor of government welfare. Until I was 16, I didn't even know there were people opposing it. These students are lucky to have someone present these arguments to them.
Perhaps we need to clarify what it means to have a "human right".
To me, having a human right to something means no one can deny me that thing just because I'm me. Specifically, no government can make a law forbidding me from having or doing that thing (with all the usual caveats about shouting fire in a crowded theater).
I have a human right to defend myself. No one can say I'm not allowed to fight back when threatened.
What I don't have is a right to demand someone give me a knife (or running shoes so I can escape).
From a housing perspective, I do have a right to housing. No one can say I can't buy that house because I have blue eyes or because I prefer limited government. What that doesn't mean is I don't have a right to demand anyone else provide me with a house.
I agree...sort of. Would someone refusing to sell a house to me because they want more money than I can pay for it be discriminating against me because of economic status/class (which in America, is also often linked with race)? I do tend to think that it's better if people aren't allowed to deny house sales for things like race or sexuality, but negotiating the rights of the seller/provider and the rights of the buyer seems to be even more complicated than this helpfully nuanced response says, at least to me.
On the contrary… I feel like any private entity should be able to discriminate against anybody for any reason at any time, or for no reason at all. Otherwise, the motion of free association is meaningless. Likewise, the ability to control one’s private property and its disposition.
On the other hand, someone who discriminates should be prepared for the full weight of public opinion to ruin his or her life. You might also not get the best price for the house you refuse to sell to [insert discrimination-victim group name].
I think it's important to distinguish what should be true in some kind of ideal society and what's a good policy in some actual situation.
For instance, ideally everyone's vote should count the same regardless of religion or ethnicity. But, if you're trying to stop ethnic or religious violence it's often necessary (and good) to craft a constitution that ensures a certain representation for various ethnic/religious groups so they can be assured that the government can't be used to oppress them.
Point is that human psychology and culture are messy. While I tend to agree we are at or near the point where racial anti-disctimination laws are no longer beneficial it's not at all clear that they weren't a temporarily needed unfortunate hack (like guaranteed representation by religion/ethnicity) needed to help achieve that end.
I understand and somewhat sympathize with this position, but I also am wary of it, as I don't think we've got a good enough mechanism in our current culture to actually enforce these things. And yes, I know it's BECAUSE we enshrined anti-discrimination into law, but I'm still very leery of it.
I think Burke would be helpful here: “the pretended rights of these theorists are all extremes; and in a proportion as they are metaphysically true, they are morally and politically false”. And “what is the use of discussing a man’s abstract right to food or medicine? The question is upon the method of procuring and administering them.”
I think a more general way to phrase an objection is the following.
Of course, we all agree that, other things being equal it's better for someone to have the option of shelter than not. However, that's true of everything and either it's pretty meaningless to say that housing is a right or it demands we prioritize it over other desierable goods.
If we take seriously the idea that the option of shelter is a right does that mean we can't trade off some degree of lack of housing against other important goods like health and happiness? Does that mean India shouldn't be subsidizing toliets until everyone there has some kind of housing?
Even a standard liberal should find that worrying.
And the only real solution is... Geolibertarianism. Houses are man-made. My right to have a house would force another to build me one. But earth is not man-made. If we admit that people are entitled to their place on earth, affordable houses will get available in libertarian ways.
I think we have to accept that most people are willing to answer yes to that question when "basic needs" are in question. I state this as an empirical observation of voter attitudes, not a moral judgement.
So ultimately it ends up coming down to:
1) What is a basic need?
2) Is the person "deserving" of that basic need?
3) Can the state afford it?
"What is the best way to provide for this basic need" is a different question.
So you might get people to say "someone who doesn't work doesn't have a basic right to housing" or "drug addicts shouldn't have housing" or "the right to housing doesn't mean the right to "fancy" housing or housing in the best neighborhoods.
But once you've lost the "basic needs" argument, your just talking about #2 and #3.
I'm a heartless bastard and don't think the economically useless deserve shelter if they can't afford it, but I'm not the median voter.
Honestly, if housing simply meant four walls and a roof in cheap areas only given out to people that wouldn't wreck it, it would be a less damaging "basic need" then say education or healthcare.
But in practice "housing is a human right" means housing of a certain standard built in expensive areas, often in an inefficient way but would still be very expensive without the government graft.
On a side note, my one experience going through section 8 housing on my bike and the local children chased after me saying "I want that bike, gimme that bike" as they tried to grab me and pull me off the bike presumably to beat me and steal it. The houses were quite nice, brand new, and it was near downtown. If it wasn't section 8 the real estate would have been extremely valuable.
There simply are not such a thing as "rights". It is a fiction humans create when they want some extra rhetorical flourish behind laws/norms. And doesn't mean anything over and above those laws/norms themselves.
Students without an ideological horse to ride will be unfazed by the "Are you willing to use force to take the money to buy the housing" argument.
For one, those students likely don't appreciate the value of money. For another, they will quibble with the concept of force. Democratically enacted laws are characterized as products of consent. Losers submit rather than fight because the chance of winning the next round means the game remains valuable even to the losers.
My touchstone is to ask myself whether the proposed "right" would be recognized by a pre-agricultural hunter/gatherer band. If you pretty much depend on other people - everybody in the tribe has to stick together, work for each other, or fewer will survive - you'll concede them "rights" in the sense that it is "right" for the tribe to invest in that effort, will it help the tribe survive?
We offer the "right to life" and indeed, to not be assaulted, because if you don't protect smaller tribe members from the larger bullying them, the tribe won't hang together, nobody will ever turn their back on another. (I'm doing a very short version of Hobbes' "Leviathan" book: does the provision of a "right" keep *everybody's* life from being nasty,brutish and short?)
If tribe members aren't given the basics of life from the tribe, whether they are sick that week and can't hunt, or not, allows them to contribute later; keeps family and friends of that person integrated with the tribe, rather than pulling away their efforts to support their loved one because the tribe will not.
In short, nobody in "primitive" hunter/gatherer tribes was starved to death, or left in the cold.
Letting people suffer and have more and more trouble contributing to the common good, is an expensive, stupid waste of resources that only a wealthy "civilization" could contemplate. The "primitives" are too poor to allow such losses.
It should also be conceded as a right by "advanced" societies, because it would pay back in the end, make them stronger. You can leave the morals out of it and use cold profit/loss calculations -as long as you are looking at the full-society picture.
If housing is a human right, does that imply a certain quality of housing to be provided?
Like, does it have to include bathrooms and kitchens? Beds? Electricity? Low levels of noise and light? Does it have to be in a reasonable distance to work, whatever that means? Where do we draw the limit?
As with all positive rights, I deeply disagree with the idea that housing is a human right, because it means someone is obligated (perhaps even enslaved) to provide you that right.
All rights are positive rights in that sense. Some are more expensive to provide than others though. Every single right on planet earth relies on the work of others to enforce.
Including what naive libertarians call "negative rights" like freedom of speech or property rights.
That poorly thought out distinction muddles the discussion unnecessarily.
It's mostly about what set of responsibilities is appropriate to assign to each individual and their organizations, the cost/benefit of each responsability you add, etc.
Negative rights are valid and undisturbed even when you're alone on a desert island. Positive rights always taking something from somebody else without requiring their consent.
Why is the distinction poorly thought out? It seems to me that the "right to life" is "you shouldn't take my life", similarly "you shouldn't take my property", and "you shouldn't block my pursuit of happiness" unless those things infringe upon other people's equal rights in those areas.
Whereas "right to housing" or "healthcare" seems to me "you should give me a house or healthcare". At the very least, that is what most people seem to mean by those things.
“You shouldn’t take my property” is a wish, not a right. Unless it imposes a responsibility to society to defend your property, it’s not actually a right. That takes money, that’s why we have judges, courts, police officers, and more, to enforce your right to property.
It doesn’t magically enforce itself.
You are all sorts of wrong about this. It being a right means you have the right to defend it. Certainly it is nicer for most people to live in a society that imposes taxes to provide a public good like police protection (which police protection generally is; even if you tried to have people opt in to police protection and excluded those that haven't, they are still free riding off the general order and lack of stray gunfire that are pretty much nonexclusionary unless you are going to use force to move people geographically). Some libertarians might disagree even with taxes for recognized public goods, but even if they do, there is still a huge difference between the coercion needed to fund police protection and enforcement and the level of coercion needed to force people to provide goods and services to other people to enforce their positive rights.
Another way to look at it would be in an utopia, you wouldn't have to do anything to protect natural rights. People would just not infringe on them. For positive rights, it requires violating people's negative rights to enforce them. It just doesn't make sense as a concept.
I don't think you have this right. It may be true that every right has an enforcement cost, but it is still possible to draw a distinction between positive and negative rights. These are different kinds of costs. In a society composed of two people, one person's right to housing clearly imposes a different and greater cost on the other than a right not to be killed.
I don't think it imposes a responsibility on society per se. It imposes a responsibility on other people (which I suppose you can argue is "society", which is, after all, just lots of other people) to not take those things. Rights don't imply enforcement, they imply morality.
+1
Once you see everything as violence, either offensive of defensive, nothing is really a right. Either the people with power decide liberty is good, or they don’t. Freedom isn’t “natural”. It’s a discretion of power.
In this world, there is nothing that means anything. There are only chemical reactions overwhelming other chemical reactions. I refuse to live in this world.
Then commit suicide, it’s the only way out.
You own nothing. If an gang kicked you out of your house and squated there, what could you do? If the police wouldn’t come at kick them out, nothing. When the police were told not to evict people during covid, that is essentially what happened.
You need a gang. That gang can decide that the title to your property entitled you to having armed men enforce your claim, but it’s that force which allows you to “own” the property.
Politics is about making sure a gang that shares your values of how society should be organized has a monopoly in force.
It depends a great deal on whether it's a right held merely against the government or against humanity in general.
A negative right against the government merely ensures the government won't do certain things to you so in that sense it doesn't obligate anyone to do anything. Ofc in practice it doesn't guarantee much either since nothing forces the government to step in and prevent gangs of armed thugs from beating you up if you say the wrong thing.
So I don't think the distinction is useless, it's just that many of the most cherished libertarian rights (freedom from violence etc) are also positive rights.
Even if that is true, saying housing is a human right is not saying much. In college in the 1970's we lived 4 to a small dorm room. Abraham lived in tents, do tents count?
Same with medical care and food. A huge % of the benefit of healthcare comes from vaccinations alone. so do people have a right to more than vaccinations? How about vaccinations, trauma care, and infant care only?
Food, a diet based on fortified hard tack will keep one alive at very low cost.
I don’t actually disagree with you. I prefer to think of rights in terms of responsibilities.
Regarding what a right to housing could entail, in a poor society providing a tent to sleep in could be what’s reasonable for that society to absorb (in many nothing might be what’s reasonable!). In a society that’s better off, perhaps providing access to homeless shelters would be the best.
In a very wealthy society, perhaps more would be reasonable. I don’t think discussing it in abstract broad terms is productive at all.
I think you do have to have abstract discussion on what is right and wrong (morality, not "rights"). I think that morally speaking, rights are meaningless, and it's all about the responsibilities we have to other people (and to ourselves). But rights are the best formulation I've seen in terms of coming up with an intuitive enforcement mechanism with inbuilt incentives.
And that terrifying prospect seems most likely to be implemented if "housing is a human right" wins the day at the ballot box. Live in the pod, eat the bugs, because that's all that you can afford!
In New York, the answer to the question seems to be "housing is a human right, but we can't afford to house all of these migrants, so we're going to change the rules and say that housing is NOT a human right". Pods were apparently not considered. Presumably, the Pods approach would have been bad optics for those people who think that people have a "right" to better housing than a Pod, but if the alternative is homelessness, I would respectfully disagree.
Do you think the situation in New York will actually change any policy positions on the left, though?
Maybe. There seems to be a big YIMBY push that seems to be coded "progressive" (though it, of course, appeals to libertarians and to those republicans who actually support property rights). When there are actual problems that everyone can see, you can sometimes get people to support solutions which would actually fix those problems. Sometimes. YIMBYs have gotten some regulations changed in the right direction, even in New York. Of course, there ARE limits; I highly doubt that anywhere in the US will go as far as to completely abolish zoning or eliminate minimum apartment sizes.
In re declaring something a “human right”, presumably to be provided by the government, the question should always be asked: “are you prepared to use violence to take the item in question to give it to your intended recipient?“
Err ... , so you say, if you do not pay your taxes in the US, the IRS just shrugs nowadays? Al Capone went to prison for tax-evasion, I recall. Highways, FDA, police, moon-landings, F-35s - all state provided - and yeah, the money to provide for that item is taken from you and given to the intended resp. unintended recipients. If you comply, no "violence" is used, ofc.. If not: good luck! Libertarianism 101, ;) I assumed Caplan-readers are already in the know.
In an emergency - West-Germany after WWII - millions of ppl were indeed put into other ppls houses, too: 1946-1968, google the fine German word: Wohnraumbewirtschaftungsgesetz - The UN in their Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) declared 1948 in §25: "1. Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care" For whatever that means.
Obviously, they are prepared to use violence.
Every once in awhile some idiot gets the idea that he won't pay his taxes and will whole up in his house when they send agents to collect. Either they manage to take him by force without hurting him or he gets killed.
Another question could be "who's going to use violence in order to prevent someone else from using violence against you." Those same police that will take your tax dollars by force also prevent randos from just murdering you and living in your house.
Don’t give them any ideas!
The process of identifying an expanding universe of "human rights" seems to have become a growth industry. This tendency has diluted the impact of the core rights that the original advocates for individual human dignity promoted. Subtle distinctions in language do matter. "Rights" too easily elide into "entitlements". Restoring focus on human "liberties" should be the objective. Freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religious observation etc are universal and indivisible human rights that all can enjoy without restricting the liberties of others or imposing specific costs upon them. Those who advocate specifc individual cosmic entitlements to housing, education etc are seeking to elevate mundane policy matters to a higher plane, no doubt in order to advance particular policies becaue they all necessitate transfers of resources. At the end of the day, housing outcomes are the result of complex and diverse decisions as to the allocation of scarce resources. To the extent that these are driven, on the one hand, by markets and, on the other hand, by planning and redistributive policy (and, if so, in what manner and to what extent) is surely just part of the argey-bargey of the political process.
No one, even on the left, believes in a literal right to housing, or health care, or any specific commodity or service. I could explain that, but maybe I'd better write it up myself instead.
As much as the Left (and increasingly, the Right) repeats this mantra; and as frequently as they show themselves willing simply to take from one to give to another, by force if necessary, I’m inclined to take them at their word.
Rights are not a political value any longer. Its straight sacrifice. You dont have a right to X. The "owner" of X has a "duty" to give it to you. The mainstream interpretation of the Constitution is that its a method of unlimited majority rule (limited only by arbitrarily selected concrete traditions. No principles need apply).
During my time in middle school and high school, I have heard many arguments in favor of government welfare. Until I was 16, I didn't even know there were people opposing it. These students are lucky to have someone present these arguments to them.
Perhaps we need to clarify what it means to have a "human right".
To me, having a human right to something means no one can deny me that thing just because I'm me. Specifically, no government can make a law forbidding me from having or doing that thing (with all the usual caveats about shouting fire in a crowded theater).
I have a human right to defend myself. No one can say I'm not allowed to fight back when threatened.
What I don't have is a right to demand someone give me a knife (or running shoes so I can escape).
From a housing perspective, I do have a right to housing. No one can say I can't buy that house because I have blue eyes or because I prefer limited government. What that doesn't mean is I don't have a right to demand anyone else provide me with a house.
No doubt that's what Chris was getting at.
I agree...sort of. Would someone refusing to sell a house to me because they want more money than I can pay for it be discriminating against me because of economic status/class (which in America, is also often linked with race)? I do tend to think that it's better if people aren't allowed to deny house sales for things like race or sexuality, but negotiating the rights of the seller/provider and the rights of the buyer seems to be even more complicated than this helpfully nuanced response says, at least to me.
On the contrary… I feel like any private entity should be able to discriminate against anybody for any reason at any time, or for no reason at all. Otherwise, the motion of free association is meaningless. Likewise, the ability to control one’s private property and its disposition.
On the other hand, someone who discriminates should be prepared for the full weight of public opinion to ruin his or her life. You might also not get the best price for the house you refuse to sell to [insert discrimination-victim group name].
I think it's important to distinguish what should be true in some kind of ideal society and what's a good policy in some actual situation.
For instance, ideally everyone's vote should count the same regardless of religion or ethnicity. But, if you're trying to stop ethnic or religious violence it's often necessary (and good) to craft a constitution that ensures a certain representation for various ethnic/religious groups so they can be assured that the government can't be used to oppress them.
Point is that human psychology and culture are messy. While I tend to agree we are at or near the point where racial anti-disctimination laws are no longer beneficial it's not at all clear that they weren't a temporarily needed unfortunate hack (like guaranteed representation by religion/ethnicity) needed to help achieve that end.
I understand and somewhat sympathize with this position, but I also am wary of it, as I don't think we've got a good enough mechanism in our current culture to actually enforce these things. And yes, I know it's BECAUSE we enshrined anti-discrimination into law, but I'm still very leery of it.
I think Burke would be helpful here: “the pretended rights of these theorists are all extremes; and in a proportion as they are metaphysically true, they are morally and politically false”. And “what is the use of discussing a man’s abstract right to food or medicine? The question is upon the method of procuring and administering them.”
I think a more general way to phrase an objection is the following.
Of course, we all agree that, other things being equal it's better for someone to have the option of shelter than not. However, that's true of everything and either it's pretty meaningless to say that housing is a right or it demands we prioritize it over other desierable goods.
If we take seriously the idea that the option of shelter is a right does that mean we can't trade off some degree of lack of housing against other important goods like health and happiness? Does that mean India shouldn't be subsidizing toliets until everyone there has some kind of housing?
Even a standard liberal should find that worrying.
And the only real solution is... Geolibertarianism. Houses are man-made. My right to have a house would force another to build me one. But earth is not man-made. If we admit that people are entitled to their place on earth, affordable houses will get available in libertarian ways.
I think we have to accept that most people are willing to answer yes to that question when "basic needs" are in question. I state this as an empirical observation of voter attitudes, not a moral judgement.
So ultimately it ends up coming down to:
1) What is a basic need?
2) Is the person "deserving" of that basic need?
3) Can the state afford it?
"What is the best way to provide for this basic need" is a different question.
So you might get people to say "someone who doesn't work doesn't have a basic right to housing" or "drug addicts shouldn't have housing" or "the right to housing doesn't mean the right to "fancy" housing or housing in the best neighborhoods.
But once you've lost the "basic needs" argument, your just talking about #2 and #3.
I'm a heartless bastard and don't think the economically useless deserve shelter if they can't afford it, but I'm not the median voter.
Honestly, if housing simply meant four walls and a roof in cheap areas only given out to people that wouldn't wreck it, it would be a less damaging "basic need" then say education or healthcare.
But in practice "housing is a human right" means housing of a certain standard built in expensive areas, often in an inefficient way but would still be very expensive without the government graft.
On a side note, my one experience going through section 8 housing on my bike and the local children chased after me saying "I want that bike, gimme that bike" as they tried to grab me and pull me off the bike presumably to beat me and steal it. The houses were quite nice, brand new, and it was near downtown. If it wasn't section 8 the real estate would have been extremely valuable.
There simply are not such a thing as "rights". It is a fiction humans create when they want some extra rhetorical flourish behind laws/norms. And doesn't mean anything over and above those laws/norms themselves.
Students without an ideological horse to ride will be unfazed by the "Are you willing to use force to take the money to buy the housing" argument.
For one, those students likely don't appreciate the value of money. For another, they will quibble with the concept of force. Democratically enacted laws are characterized as products of consent. Losers submit rather than fight because the chance of winning the next round means the game remains valuable even to the losers.
This guy says that ensuring positive rights involves the violation of negative rights. Interesting: https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/fundamental-humans-rights-unless
This guy says that ensuring positive rights involves the violation of negative rights. Interesting: https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/fundamental-humans-rights-unless
My touchstone is to ask myself whether the proposed "right" would be recognized by a pre-agricultural hunter/gatherer band. If you pretty much depend on other people - everybody in the tribe has to stick together, work for each other, or fewer will survive - you'll concede them "rights" in the sense that it is "right" for the tribe to invest in that effort, will it help the tribe survive?
We offer the "right to life" and indeed, to not be assaulted, because if you don't protect smaller tribe members from the larger bullying them, the tribe won't hang together, nobody will ever turn their back on another. (I'm doing a very short version of Hobbes' "Leviathan" book: does the provision of a "right" keep *everybody's* life from being nasty,brutish and short?)
If tribe members aren't given the basics of life from the tribe, whether they are sick that week and can't hunt, or not, allows them to contribute later; keeps family and friends of that person integrated with the tribe, rather than pulling away their efforts to support their loved one because the tribe will not.
In short, nobody in "primitive" hunter/gatherer tribes was starved to death, or left in the cold.
Letting people suffer and have more and more trouble contributing to the common good, is an expensive, stupid waste of resources that only a wealthy "civilization" could contemplate. The "primitives" are too poor to allow such losses.
It should also be conceded as a right by "advanced" societies, because it would pay back in the end, make them stronger. You can leave the morals out of it and use cold profit/loss calculations -as long as you are looking at the full-society picture.
If housing is a human right, does that imply a certain quality of housing to be provided?
Like, does it have to include bathrooms and kitchens? Beds? Electricity? Low levels of noise and light? Does it have to be in a reasonable distance to work, whatever that means? Where do we draw the limit?