Healthcare is NOT a right.

you call yourself a philosopher??? rights are authorized expectations, as per J.S. Mill. Anything we can agree on to call a right is a right.

Semantics. I don't think healthcare is a right. I think national healthcare is something that is good to do.So owhy discuss if it meets the criterion of a right. Who cares, that an irrelevant question.

jjjjjjjjjjjjjjj wrote:

you call yourself a philosopher??? rights are authorized expectations, as per J.S. Mill. Anything we can agree on to call a right is a right.

Which allows a person to have a right to own another person. Seems like a bad social system to me.

Mtn dew wrote:

jjjjjjjjjjjjjjj wrote:

you call yourself a philosopher??? rights are authorized expectations, as per J.S. Mill. Anything we can agree on to call a right is a right.

Which allows a person to have a right to own another person. Seems like a bad social system to me.

That wasn't the point.

Anyway, why don't we try to actually marshal some support for these naked assertions. It shouldn't be hard. Locke, Hobbes, and generations of their followers have already done it. Are some rights pre-political (and therefore distinguishable from state-created rights)? Or do rights exist at the pleasure of the state?

Do you have the natural right to the fruit of your labor?

Or are you only able to enjoy the fruit because the coercive power of the state protects you from those who would take it from you?

I have sympathy for both views, though I incline toward the former.

I do think that if the latter view is true, if we really owe everything to the state, then "rights" becomes a meaningless concept, because you don't actually have a right to anything; you merely have privileges that the state sees fit to bestow upon you.

Usher wrote:

Go straight to hell.

I just had a seizure and have been diagnosed with a brain tumor. .

Sounds like you'll be headed there first. Have a nice trip asshole.

I don't think we owe our rights to the state. The state "protects" some rights, but only because the state prohibits others from doing so.

Mtn dew wrote:I don't think we owe our rights to the state.

Never would have guessed.

Tommy Jefferson wrote:

Article XI

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

If you can't understand this, you don't deserve to be an American. This, Bill of Right, along with the clarification from the Constitution undeniably construes the Rigt to Healthcare.

If a man living in a shack by himself in the wilderness dies from cancer, have his rights been infringed upon? Obviously not.

Though this demands the response, "that's not the same as someone living in a city with other people who can help."

Such a response begs the question, are our rights, then, determined by OTHER PEOPLE, or are they INHERENT in the human condition?

In other words - are our rights universal or subject to the whims of others?

authorized expectations vary widely in what we like, but I don't think that you can fit slavery under the definition of a right as what we can all agree on to call a right, except by excluding certain categories of people from the 'we', since those to be enslaved could not agree on this (that is, it would not be rational to agree to a condition in which their life itself was under the absolute control of another). And, taking a universalistic approach, say the veil of ignorance of Rawls, no one could rationally agree to a principle of slavery when they did not know what place they would have in the posited future society that admitted slavery. So, short answer: slavery as right under the definition of right as authorized expectation does not work.

But notice the problem in what I have argued. I cite a utilitarian definition (Mill's) and clearly it would be easy to argue that in some hypothetical society in which slavery is legal, the maximization of happiness, defined as the sum total of pleasure (adjusted in absolute value according to whether it is physical or intellectual), could allow for slavery, where the great majority were served by it. It is not likely that this could happen, as a non slave economy will always be more dynamic, etc. So, Mill's own utilitarianism seems compatible with such a society even if he was against slavery. But a Kantian system in which the rationality of the idea will be the basis for its acceptance, could take the authorized expectation in rational terms and exclude slavery. Kant would of course exclude slavery on other grounds as well: 1) as violating the principle of free, rational contract at the basis of all societies (On the Alleged Right to Lie from Philanthropic Concerns: he is a social contract theorist and hence anti-slavery) and 2) slavery violates the categorical imperative, specifically the formula of humanity: treat the humanity in your own person (that is, your power of reason), or in that of others, never merely as a means but also at the same time as an end in itself.

unless you go the Kantian route, I don't see how you are going to justify the notion of rights at all. The Social Contract theorists prior to Kant provide little more than bald assertions on this point. The rights of man are little more than a declaration or pseudo-theological (Hobbes, Locke) assertion without some argument for them. Maybe we should try the Nietzschean approach for anti-Nietzschean values and say that these values are useful fictions and few outside of an aristocracy would like to live in a society in which many of them were not protected by the state.

The concept of rights is a construct. As someone else said referencing John Stuart Mills, if you get enough people to agree something is a right it becomes one. Why do we think we have rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? Because Jefferson adapted the idea from Locke and it caught on. Prove that we have those rights. Prove that we don't.

Conservatives love to cite military and police protection as "rights." Why? If hordes of Canadians invade my town and intent on eating my doughnuts why do I have a right to expect the army to protect me any more than I have right to expect the local hospital to fix my arm if I break it?

We do what we do because we decide it will make life better in some significant way.

Big loans, no medical insurance... That philosophy caused the financial crash in the first place.

Stop being a dumbo and pay the tax like the rest of us (the world does) (and i am only talking to those that dont think it should be a right)

If you suddenly fell out of a job, should they just let you die when you are having a heart attack...

Should they?

The other option is that they continue to rescue anyone and let them all pay back by loans. Soon they won't be able to get decent living and food and fall out of their jobs and fail to pay anything back.

Then the loan industry goes zero once more and the circle can start all over.

I hope you die, a long, expensive, painful death, that costs your family everything they own.

And right before you die, you'll remember what an asshole you were here, and where you sit at this moment.

You are worth less than excrement.

healthcare will be a right of every u.s. resident very soon now thanks to obama.

themanontherun wrote:

[quote]Tommy Jefferson wrote:

Article XI

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

If you can't understand this, you don't deserve to be an American. This, Bill of Right, along with the clarification from the Constitution undeniably construes the Rigt to Healthcare.

quote]

Maybe nitpicky, but the above selection of the Constitution is the ninth amendment. There is no article eleven.

On another note, it seems that those who are against the public option are under some kind of illusion that we currently have great individual freedom over our own health care. We are acutally totally taken advantage of by corporate tyrants who care about profits, not our health.

All the best to Usher...I hope you heal well and find a way to retire comfortably.

"On another note, it seems that those who are against the public option are under some kind of illusion that we currently have great individual freedom over our own health care. We are acutally totally taken advantage of by corporate tyrants who care about profits, not our health."

So work on reform that ensures these companies deliver the product they suggest they're offering (beneficial protection from unforeseen risk). Don't give the government an in on 1/6th of our GDP, thrust regulations on us so ridiculous they could only be from the government (prison time for not having coverage? REALLY?) and don't add more burden onto the backs of those already supporting the weight of society (I'm talking about middle and upper middle class, not the truly rich).

The previous post, of course was correct. It is IX, not XI, my bad.

And for "themanontherun", you need to stop running long enough to acknowledge that this has been a growing problem for the past 50 years, and only getting worse. The failure of industry to moderate their profit taking, and the inability of previous administrations (and the public) to grab it by the throat has led to our current condition, i.e. Obama finally trying to do something about it.