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Comment by bischofs | Hacker News Reader

I don't think internet access is a human right, a simple test is if the internet goes down are my rights being violated?

Can you really put this in the same category as the right to pursue happiness or health? or the right to defend yourself?

Classifying everything as a right is super fun and feels important but it actually takes away from the actual human rights.

Health care is another example - do you have the right to an EKG machine? or a drug that was just invented using thousands of man hours of pharma research? Should those people work for free so that a poor persons rights are not violated?

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I completely agree.

Most people confuse positive rights and negative rights.

The inherent / natural / fundamental rights are the negative rights: life, liberty, and property. These are the rights that nobody else may take away from you unilaterally, hence "negative." These may be further distilled into the basic right of self-ownership over your body. It requires an appreciation of human dignity to acknowledge these rights.

The positive rights are more like privileges: things that somebody else must provide for you. These are not really rights at all, since it makes someone else your slave in the extreme case, hence violating their prior right to liberty. These "rights" should be called "privileges" instead, and we'll stop being confused about it.

Let's go to the extreme: the desert island. If I'm sick, and you're a doctor, and I have a right to healthcare, then what? If I truly have that right, and you are the only one who may provide it, then I can force you to treat my sickness, and you become my slave. The same goes for clean water, food, shelter, education, police protection, internet access, flying cars, etc.

Yes, there are plenty of things that are really nice to have and make living in a modern society a lot better. But these are not rights. Too often we abridge the fundamental rights in order to provide the privileges of citizenship bestowed upon the masses by redistributive governments.

You could view it as a form of the right to assemble in the US constitution. The government doesn't have to give you a place to assemble, your rights aren't violated if your meeting venue is double booked, etc. But the government can't categorically preclude you from meeting.

Fair access to the internet, however, feels to me more like a right. If the government shuts down cellular internet access at protest sites, it feels like a violation of rights.

I disagree. The spectrum is owned by the public which is managed by an elected government of the people. If a protest were to be judged by elected officials, or those appointed by them, to be in danger of harming citizens then taking actions like blocking access to the wireless spectrum for communication and organization purposes would be within the public good. I should think they would explain why this decision was made.

Because these are elected officials or appointed by these elected officials, if the public found their judgement to be wrong or unfair, they can elect someone else to judge it.

No offense, but, I would never want you in any position of power over me.

No offense taken but I'm not sure why my statement provoked a response like yours.

I stated that the people delegate these types of decision to elected officials. Their job is to protect the people. If, in some instance, they judged that a protest was in danger of harming the people and cutting cellular spectrum to that protest was the most effective method which could immediately relieve that danger, they could and should take it. And lastly, they should explain to the public why they took that measure.

The people can then judge if it was a good decision or not through the democratic process. Which I have apparently limited my potential vote count by 1 if I ever decided to run.

Because in practice it often doesn't work out that way. Republics and representative government, especially in their modern conception from the 18th century, were not simply a different way of appointing kings and their subsidiary advisors with broadly defined powers of "protection" over people under vassalage at their discretionary interpretation. Elections in most modern states don't confer that kind of supreme rule. It is the primacy of law, which constrains leaders from encroaching like that, and applied objectively to citizens in regards to their own rights and responsibilities that drives most countries you and I would probably say we'd like to live in. What you're describing isn't too tangibly different from the Spartan ephors.

"Their job is to protect the people" is a recent and paternalistic innovation. Better, IMO, is to write and uphold a set of laws that provide the best framework for human flourishing. This means deliberately not protecting people from certain risks, where the costs in terms of other values outweighs the benefits of risk reduction.

Like, the US would be safer if we confiscated every gun and made gun ownership illegal. It'd be a worse country to live in, though, according to our own values. It's not worth the trade - we care about more than simple safety.

I mean that in an immediate threat sort of way. For instance, if someone robbing a bank it's the governments job to protect the citizens by apprehending the suspect. It's not the citizens job to protect themselves from immediate danger.

Flooding in Houston - it is the governments job to help people to safety. It isn't their job to buy them a new home if they didn't purchase insurance.

This sounds to me a lot like abdicating personal responsibility for physical safety to governmental organizations. Like, it's absolutely your job to protect yourself from immediate physical danger. Protecting others is supererogatory.

You're parsing now. Protecting yourself from an immediate threat is of course your responsibility. However, the government can hold the person liable for any harm they caused you. So immediate is a poor word as it can be easily misinterpreted and that's my fault.

What I mean for example is it's not the citizens role to form a mob and hunt down a suspected criminal. That's the governments role.

In your original post you said "they [the authorities] judged". In the case of a bank robbery, it is the bank owners who are seeking protection of their property rights. It's not analogous to picking sides to stop a protest in the public square when multiple sides have a stake in it. The bar for abridging freedom of speech in the U.S. as a precipitating cause of immediate danger is very high.

I agree it would have to be an extraordinary circumstance. When a protest becomes violent it is no longer a free speech issue though. If jamming radio frequency communication was somehow the best way to stop a bad situation from getting worse then it would be appropriate to do so. But it should be justified.

Honestly, I struggle to come up with a scenario where jamming public internet access would be the best course of action. But hypothetically I don't see it as a violation of human rights to temporarily stop people in an area from communicating through the Internet on public airwaves if it's a reasonable and effective countermeasure to preventing disaster.

Honestly, I struggle to come up with a scenario where jamming public internet access would be the best course of action

Happy to hear it. But it's pretty important to me and I think most other people that any government vested with the power to do that be required to legislate - through legislative representatives into the supreme law, not via FCC or other cabinet regulations - an exact and generalized criteria that can't be tainted by discretionary judgment or classified information without criminal accountability. It's not easy to formulate - as it shouldn't be.

I disagree that "the US would be safer" if we had no guns.

Coming from a place where public ownership of firearms is banned, I can tell you that criminals can do what they want with just the might of their clinched fists.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/08/25/non-english-speak...

http://www.inquisitr.com/3428608/london-mayor-sadiq-khan-to-...

That's what effective method rational has resulted into. I would rather have them go by the book, than what they imagine to be effective.

The UK has a very different view of what "free speech" is. In effect the UK does not have free speech. This would be unconstitutional in the USA.

As for the first link, although it's absolutely crazy (especially considering that the "less vulnerable" people likely subsidize most of the police force) we do live in a society and someone has to make the decisions. These people are elected or appointed by the elected. If we don't like it we can protest and run another candidate and elect them.

It honestly sounds like pragmatism from a police force that has been decimated by budget cuts made by elected representatives whose electorate simply doesn't want to pay the taxes required to fully fund a police force that can service everyone. You can't have it both ways. If it bothers you then vote for someone who says they will increase the budget by other cutting programs you don't value as much or by raising taxes.

Take action through the democratic process to invoke the change you'd like to see and shape the world. The people passing policy you don't like certainly have and are the authority precisely because they have. But there's nothing stopping you.

Thanks. I mean it.

>Take action

I am, by speaking up here.

> Thanks. I mean it.

What do you mean?

Public squares are also owned by the public and managed by the government. Does that mean the government should be able to pick and choose which viewpoints are valid enough to use the public square, for the sake of the public good?

They already do. You are given a permit and if it's judged to be out of hand and a threat to the public then they can and do force the crowd to disperse. This happens all the time.

So, one manner in which rights are violated is justification for another? The idea of that a "permit" could be possibly required to exercise one's "rights" is a nonsensical Orwellian sleight of hand - if something is a right, then one does not need permission!

Your comments seem to be advocating for democratic totalitarianism, which is directly opposed the concept of individual rights.

You sound like an anarchist.

If you want to organize a group of people to use a public facility you need to request a permit. This is so that proper actions can be taken to make the event safe and to ensure that others have not planned access to that resource for that day.

The state can not refuse to give a permit because of the content of the protest or organization - that would be a rights violation. However, if the gathering becomes unruly and dangerous to the public then of course it can be broken up. You are now violating the rights of others and that's where your rights end.

Society and civilization does not survive in chaos.

Any advocating for distributed power is going to sound like "anarchy" to someone thinking in a centralized paradigm. But despite our tendency to explain things by creating singular narratives, society is not a top-down entity.

"Dangerous to the public" is simply one of the standard refrains used by groups in power looking to suppress others under the color of law. It's easy to argue that dissent should be contained when you're part of the majority.

Democracy is distributed power. Dissent has its voice in a democracy but should also respect that it is a not a majority opinion. It should work to peacefully persuade enough of its virtue to become the oppressive majority. Otherwise it's totalitarianism.

There's more than one kind of power. Democracy has one power available to it - the ability to make people submit to the laws they pass and enforce.

There's another type: the ability to do things and reshape the environment in the ways you want. Call it "agency" instead. Democracy isn't necessarily conducive to fostering agency.

Democracy is distributed voice, but its power is centralized. It invites every one of us to fashion ourselves as mini-autocrats, and then bicker over which specific top-down vision should be implemented.

> It [dissent] should work to peacefully persuade enough of its virtue to become the oppressive majority

The existence of my rights does not depend on my ability to convince a majority that I have those rights. Your assertion sounds like someone who comfortably enjoys the power of the majority, lording it over the oppressed.

> Otherwise it's totalitarianism

Democracy and totalitarianism are orthogonal, but most adherents of democracy seem to fall back on totalitarianism, because they mistakenly believe that having a voice is sufficient freedom. In actuality, tyranny of the majority is still tyranny. Which is why we have the concept of rights that can be appealed to beyond whatever the local mob decides.

That's policing actions, not the content of the messaging. Obviously setting fire in a movie theater is something policed, because it's not a purely communicative action.

a simple test is if the internet goes down are my rights being violated?

This is a bad argument, because it ignores the vector of the rights removal, and that matters in this debate.

For example, if a tree falls on you in a storm while you are writing an anti-government book and you die are your rights being violated? Obviously not. However if THE GOVERNMENT™ comes in and kills you for speaking against them then yes your rights are being violated.

Your example would be better served to say: A simple test, if the government shuts your internet down for [reasons] are your rights being violated? Not as simple of an answer.

I disagree that the internet is a basic right, but don't think that's the best argument.

> For example, if a tree falls on you in a storm while you are writing an anti-government book and you die are your rights being violated? Obviously not. However if THE GOVERNMENT™ comes in and kills you for speaking against them then yes your rights are being violated.

I think you're leaving out the example that highlights most obvious criticism of this formulation of rights. That example would be the government not using public funds to provide access to the internet.

Free speech is a negative right, the only kind of right possible to have without forcing someone else to provide for your rights.

Should government provide you a book and a pen to write your anti-government book? That is equivalent of internet. If I chose to live on top of some mountain should government spend $$$ to stretch a line to my mountain ?

Free speech is not a "negative right". There are definitely burdens placed on others to maintain it. Who is going to stop the government from telling you to keep your mouth shut, and then threatening you with violence if you open it? That is the reality in many places. Those who speak up often pay a heavy cost without some sort of protection. Even in places where forms of free speech are accepted, the cost to maintain it is high.

Perhaps the libertarian concept of free speech is the "ability to talk to oneself in an empty room", which is pathetic.

> ability to talk to oneself in an empty room

Not sure why it is pathetic because you can always bring people in who are interesting in listening. What is your concept of "free speech" then ? Going into other people's home and shouting ?

> Who is going to stop the government from telling you to keep your mouth shut

The constitution and courts. If both those options fail it is reasonable to pick up arms against the government too.

>Not sure why it is pathetic because you can always bring people in who are interesting in listening.

"The government has banned congregating, and one of the people you're meeting with in secret is a mole who is going to rat you out to the government anyways. There is also a network of listening equipment installed in various properties to monitor citizen behavior."

That isn't fantasy, it has really happened in some societies. The point is, if the society you're part of does not value freedom of speech, it can be squashed. One can speak their mind, but with the threat of dire consequences, their mouth remains shut, and their "right to free speech" suppressed. If a right is suppressed, who is burdened with protecting that right? No one? Is the above example of an oppressive society acceptable with the concept of free speech being a negative right? If so, the concept of negative rights is useless in a realistic context, as it is merely being pedantic and does not actually offer a better alternative. With a bar so low, terrible outcomes become "acceptable".

Typically free speech means you can speak your mind in a public forum without fear of harm. This includes dissenting views of the current government. While others may actually attempt to harm you, laws are in place to make those parties potentially reconsider taking such actions.

>The constitution and courts. If both those options fail it is reasonable to pick up arms against the government too.

Maintaining a constitution and court system is of no burden to anyone? So your form of free speech requires the forced service of judges and legislators? If arms are required, who is to provide them? Are you going to force gunsmiths to provide everyone with a gun?

Food or shelter are not produced for free either, and they are still widely accepted human rights. Of course it's clear that one cannot just go and label arbitrarily expensive things as human rights, but of course guaranteeing human rights can take a nontrivial amount of work.

This does not mean anyone should "work for free", states and other administrations are supposed to guarantee human rights and they can pay for that work.

> This does not mean anyone should "work for free", states and other administrations are supposed to guarantee human rights and they can pay for that work.

What about in a country in crisis like Venezuela with no money to afford human rights?

In a time of crisis, do farmers and doctors need to work for free to guarantee the human rights of others? How about Amazon warehouse workers?

In a time of crisis, do farmers and doctors need to work for free to guarantee the human rights of others? How about Amazon warehouse workers?

Yes, as they have always done. It's called paying taxes.

In my country, the media even underlines that every year by calculating how many days the average worker does "for free" (ie, to pay the various taxes), and on that day, counting from January 1st, they announce it on TV and such.

Yet they fail to count when you stop living for free, when society stops paying for your peace and security. That happens in the exact same second.

I can't decode what you're saying, sorry.

The value the average person pays in taxes is the exact same value that the average person gets from the services those taxes provide.

What an extraordinary statement. So it doesn't matter what the government does with the money, the average person always gets the same value for the same tax bill? I don't know why we bother to have elections.

I think the difference is that you have a right to procure food and a right to create your own shelter. You don't have a right that requires someone to give you food or give you shelter.

You don't have a right as an individual to force another individual to give you material goods.

You do have a right to food, shelter, and physical security, and if you don't have those, then yes, your rights are being violated and the government is failing in it's responsibilities.

I guess we disagree on fundamental principals. Governments require humans to exist. Humans do not require governments to exist. Rights exist for humans regardless of whether or not they are being governed (or in spite of being governed!).

Right. Conditions of anarchy where security isn't guaranteed have a tendency toward massive violations of rights. Both of "property" rights and "human" rights.

>>> Rights exist for humans regardless of whether or not they are being governed

I don't know, I mean rights as we know it didn't exist until relatively recently when they were recognised and enforced by governments.

I don't see how "free speech" can exist without something protecting that right. Yes, I know, technically the person shutting you up is technically violating your right. But without an objective arbiter such as society, they were just exercising their right to shut you up, which, in their view, is their god given right, who's to say.

> states and other administrations are supposed to guarantee human rights and they can pay for that work.

States cannot pay until they have a value to pay with, and the value a state can dispose of is created by individuals.

The key is in the word "access". In most countries, there is always _access_ to food or shelter through social services on a basis of immediate need, but not long term property rights over it or the resources to secure it long term.

George Carlin on Rights vs. Privileges.

https://youtu.be/gaa9iw85tW8?t=261

This dialog is tangential at best. Sure, if you want to call them privileges instead of rights because they are inherently violable, go ahead, but everyone else will refer to them as rights because its the common nomenclature. The idea of a right is that governments must work to secure them for its people.

To redirect back to the parent post: if you don't want to call them rights, do you think internet access should be an essential privilege that governments must secure for their people? If so, how do you propose that privilege be fulfilled in rural communities that currently don't have internet access? It would seem to be a fundamental violation of the governmental charter not to provide it, and who would be held accountable for that violation?

>The idea of a right is that governments must work to secure them for its people.

>If so, how do you propose that privilege be fulfilled in rural communities that currently don't have internet access?

I think a lot of the noise around this issue comes down to not clearly delineating between positive and negative rights:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=positive+vs.+negative+rights

...in the American tradition, "internet access as a right" means that that others (government, etc.) can't deprive you of whatever internet access you happen to have. Whereas other traditions interpret "internet access as a right" as something that the community needs to provide to individuals.

>If so, how do you propose that privilege be fulfilled in rural communities that currently don't have internet access?

By not letting monopolistic ISPs stop municipal networks.

Nationalizing everything is not going to work. Most water, electric boards are not national/state government responsibilities. Venezuela model does not work, can't work for USA for sure.

> Should those people work for free so that a poor persons rights are not violated?

Just because something is a human right, doesn't mean society (or whoever else) has to provide that for free.

Well, a humane society would.

The point is that _rights_ ought to be things that, in the absence of a society, you already _have_. (Life, liberty, right to property, etc) They are things that a just society is obligated to not take _away_ from you. Things that a just and wealthy society should be able to provide _for_ its citizens (health care, economic security, etc), are laudable and highly important goals. They are not rights though -- not because they aren't important enough, but simply because they are a categorically different sort of thing.

The whole reason we have the concept of rights is that a social structure in which people do not have rights is an illegitimate one. An impoverished island nation which cannot afford to provide healthcare or internet access to its citizens is not illegitimate because of it.

Your comment flies in the face of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which certainly features medical care and education.

Which, in turn, flies in the face of the original, Lockeian definition of "natural rights".

I'm not saying this article is alone in diluting the meaning of a "right", it's been going on for years all around the world. That dilution, though, has made it basically useless as a concept.

This stance that there has been some sort of dilution would make more sense in a world where Locke's formulation of rights was a) unique and b) widely accepted as canonical.

As neither are true, it begs the question.

The UDHR emerged from WWII, just as did the Geneva Conventions and the U.N. and the Nuremberg war crimes trials. They're not useless. And they diluted nothing. Human beings learned something. But somehow from then to now failed to figure out a way to broaden the consensus, and hold partners accountable.

It's hardly any different than a family member who has a gambling problem, or drug addiction. Do you kick them to the curb? Or do you persist in making the best of a crappy situation? In most families it's a back and forth between making the best and punishing them in a persistent passive aggressive struggle.

And global politics is no different, no less messy. But having ethical standards is still not useless.

United Nations disagrees with you, look at article 26 for example:

Article 26.

(1) Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.

As with your sibling comment:

> I'm not saying this article is alone in diluting the meaning of a "right", it's been going on for years all around the world. That dilution, though, has made it basically useless as a concept.

I'd make it a bit more specific - human rights are things that you have in the absence of society, as they are universally applicable, but they don't encompass all rights. A citizen can have a right to something provided by their society.

Rights only make sense in the context of a society, because they can only govern the actions of fellow humans. Animals know nothing about rights. Non-living matter knows nothing at all, and so certainly nothing about rights.

Therefore, rights only exist to guide and constrain what humans do, and any group of humans living together is a society.

I don't agree that rights only make sense in the context of a society, as rights may exist without being codified, it's just significantly more difficult to assert them without societal assistance.

I can assert rights to other people without being a member of human society. My right to the apple on the ground is the classic example.

If you're talking to other people, you're a member of a human society.

The only people who aren't members of society live entirely alone 100% of the time.

Edited because I can't reply:

We've hit a definitional issue, and we're not going to be able to resolve it.

You know what definition I used, I know what definition you're using, so continuing is pointless.

No, if you're interacting with other people persistently or associated with people you're a member of society. If you interact with people sporadically, you're not necessarily a member of a human society. If we're talking state of nature here, even persistent interaction doesn't necessarily mean society - that generally requires cooperation.

There's no such thing as a natural right. You don't have a natural right to life, just head out into the wilderness and see how much nature cares about your natural right to become certain of that.

All rights are social covenants provided by fellow humans.

In the absence of society there are no such things as "rights" and most especially the ones you identified. In fact, in nature it's quite common for any or all of those things to be taken away.

> in nature it's quite common for any or all of those things to be taken away

Not by people, is the point. Rights only apply in terms of humans and human society, obviously.

I doubt humans that existed pre-civilization were any less likely to violently take property and life from other humans than were the apes they evolved from. Killing and eating your neighbor is one of the most fundamental freedoms you have as an organism. Only in the context of society does exercising that natural freedom become a violation of someone's rights.

> The point is that _rights_ ought to be things that, in the absence of a society, you already _have_.

That's simply just an absurd and frankly silly point. Stop arguing about what words should mean and pay attention to the message people are communicating. Rights are whatever society agrees they are, it's as simple as that, nothing more and nothing less; no rights are inherent. There is not "should", there is only what is.

Sure, words mean whatever the consensus is that they mean. My definition above is just the original one. If we decide it's this new, broader thing, then so be it.

But if "rights" encompass things that a perfectly just, well-intentioned society might very well _not be physically capable_ of providing, simply due to lack of resources, then what the hell is the point of calling something a "right" at all? What does that accomplish? What does that mean?

All I'm saying is that this new, pretty much meaningless definition we've given it of "stuff we want" is much less useful than the original.

> My definition above is just the original one.

And outdated and not accepted one. Don't be a prescriptivist, words don't have a single fixed meaning, just because Lock defined right to mean something long long ago doesn't mean that's what people mean when they use the word.

> If we decide it's this new, broader thing, then so be it.

That was decided by the masses long ago. Language evolves. This is not "new" nor is it meaningless. Rights means stuff we as a majority agree everyone should have, it's not less useful, and it's what rights have always actually meant. Anyone arguing about natural rights vs whatever is having a meaningless semantic argument with no one who matters. There are no natural rights, the concept is frankly silly; rights are inherently social in nature and have always been simply what people agree on.

> Don't be a prescriptivist, words don't have a single fixed meaning, just because Lock defined right to mean something long long ago doesn't mean that's what people mean when they use the word.

Yes, I know. I agreed with that in the comment you're replying to.

> Rights means stuff we as a majority agree everyone should have, it's not less useful, and it's what rights have always actually meant.

If "rights" are just "things we want people to have", then why is "internet access" a right, but not a yacht or a penthouse apartment? Wouldn't we be happier if everyone had those?

I don't give a shit, really, if people go for a "Locke conception" of rights or whatever. I just don't really have a clue what it means anymore to say something is a "human right," if it includes super expensive stuff that a lot of countries can't afford.

> If "rights" are just "things we want people to have", then why is "internet access" a right, but not a yacht or a penthouse apartment? Wouldn't we be happier if everyone had those?

Things we "agree" people should have. You won't find a majority of society agrees everyone should have a penthouse or a yacht, why... because rights are determined by reason and it's unreasonable to provide everyone with a penthouse and a yacht, it is not unreasonable to provide everyone with internet access. How do we define reasonable... through thoughtful discussion, debate, and law.

You're trying to cut the human out of the equation and have some way to define right that's internally logically self consistent, but people don't work that way. Agreement that something is reasonable is how humans work.

> I just don't really have a clue what it means anymore to say something is a "human right," i

I don't think that's true, I think you can perfectly well see how these things are defined, you just don't like it for some reason.

If rights a merely a social contract, then what is absurd about trying to negotiate the terms of that contract? The parent's definition of rights may not be what people often mean; that doesn't mean their definition isn't useful.

> then what is absurd about trying to negotiate the terms of that contract?

Nothing, that's rather the point I'm making, rights are not inherent, they are social agreements and are thus always up for renegotiation. You are agreeing with me.

That's not what the OP is doing, the OP is trying to claim something isn't a right because it doesn't fit his definition of the word, he's pulling a no true Scottsman on a thing saying it's not a right even though society agrees it is.

I mean no disrespect, but I don't agree with you. My claim is that the OP, by haggling about definitions, is trying to negotiate the meaning of the word.

edit: and by that, I mean that it doesn't make sense to call the OP's argument absurd.

I don't believe that the OP is pulling a No True Scottsman. A No True Scottsman is really all about shifting your definition of a category in unprincipled ways in response to counter-examples. The OP is simply saying that many things other people call rights should not be.

I do think it's a fallacy to claim that, given the fluidity of language, there is therefore no meaningful concept that we might be trying to point to.

I do think there is a meaningful concept that the OP is trying to bring clarity on by restricting the meaning and usage of the word rights. I think the way the word "rights" is used today unhelpfully equivocates between different concepts and thus impoverishes our ability to think clearly about legal and policy issues.

Language may something that is negotiated, a social construct, but it is not arbitrary.

> My claim is that the OP, by haggling about definitions, is trying to negotiate the meaning of the word.

Oh, ok, yes he is and that's the problem, he's wrong. It's a stupid semantic debate where he's arguing over a word and everyone else is discussing what things we should guarantee everyone has. We call those things rights, whether the OP likes it or not, the issue at hand is what those rights should be, not what the word rights means.

> ...he's arguing over a word and everyone else is discussing what things we should guarantee everyone has.

And I would say that settling on a useful definition of the word is a great way to settle the question of actual policy. In this sense, the definition becomes a decision criteria.

And that's exactly what won't work; there isn't a single set of decision criteria that can replace consensus and reason. People aren't algorithms, you can't simplify their values and judgement into decision criteria. It doesn't work for morals and it doesn't work for law.

The attempt to limit rights to categories like positive, negative, or natural is a pointless semantic debate that doesn't actually matter because law doesn't work that way, it works by consensus, which is messy and not always rational out of context of the history of the times they came to be. Quite simply, it's naive.

Something is a right if enough people say it is, period. No other criteria matters, never has, and never will. You either understand this, or you don't and engage is pointless debates telling people they can't use a particular word because you're too dumb to realize they're discussing a concept that exists independently of the word "right" and your attempt to forbid them from using the word "right" to represent that concept isn't going to change the concept they're discussing.

As soon as you say what rights ought to be, you've just excluded yourself from the discussion and started a semantic debate. There is no "ought", there is simply that which enough people agree to.

I believe the way you presented your two arguments shows them as non mutually exclusive. Couldn't healthcare or economic security be something that society is obligated to not take _away_ from you, while also not being something that a society should provide?

For the record, I'm not advocating for calling any of those things rights. Simply posing a question regarding the above statements.

How would you have a right to property without society?

Property, like money and other social constructs, require a society to recognise it. You can't "own" anything of other people don't recognise the fact that you own it. Which means you need society to govern who owns what.

I realise I'm a little late to the game, but rights were explained to me once as: An item to which a group has access, that the ruling authority cannot block.

Examples of this can be speech, in the US, the government does not grant speech, but rather they do not block access to it (within limits as defined by the SC). Also, the right the bear arms, it's something again that is inherently the citizens but the government does not block access.

In the case of Internet, it being a right is different to it being a utility. As a right the government would be obligated to not block people from accessing it (again SC caveat) but has no obligation to provide it.

I will caveat by saying that also disallowed are underhanded methods of blocking access to rights or blocked rights as a side effect (whether intentional or not). So the government and citizenry has to ensure that rights are being preserved by evaluating new and existing laws and adjust course as needed (either via redrafting legislation or via the SC)

Of course, the above definition assumes the existence of a state, but I think that's fair. In a true anarchy we have all freedoms but of course the risks that go with that. The establishment of a state necessitates the blocking of some "freedoms" but depending on the government we retain some, which are then known as rights.

From the perspective that there's some nature-given right inside of you that gives you the "right" to pursue life, liberty, and happiness, then there's no argument to be had. An axiomatic assumption has already been made on the innate dignity and moral quality of all humans.

From the perspective that rights are a legal device that people or governments create (and enforce) in order to achieve broad social or government aims in the form of a citizen's baseline, then internet as a right should be on the table for discussion. It should be noted that rights as a legal device and rights as an innate moral assumption are not contradictory.

I do believe that internet will become increasingly related to a person's ability to communicate, summon vehicles, find out and talk about government and politics, organize and find human meetings, use maps, utilize business services, or coordinate emergency information.

Without internet, a person can still do these things, but I think there's a general drop in quality of reach and capability. I think there's also a discussion to be had about whether a citizen baseline of internet access means a more prosperous or robust nation.

I understand your argument about the meaning of the term "human right," but that is obviously just a semantic argument. In modern mainstream political parlance, "human right" means approximately "something that is so important that governments ought to prioritize it and spend public funds on it."

The distinction you're making is that of negative and positive rights, which is an important basic topic in traditional rights theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_and_positive_rights

> a simple test is if the internet goes down are my rights being violated?

Depends; is someone doing it on purpose so that you don't have access, or it is a genuine equipment failure?

> I don't think internet access is a human right, a simple test is if the internet goes down are my rights being violated?

It is, in some countries. People are forgetting that human rights is just a law. Human rights are different in different countries and times. It's just a set of (very vague) rules a bunch of people agreed on, nothing more.

You are right. Someone has to work to ensure you have internet. If internet is your right that means should someone always work to provide you internet? (Forced Labor?)

I can understand making internet a right as an extension of "free speech". For example no convict should ever be disallowed from using internet and so on.

I would guess that placing a town under siege (disallowing all food shipments) would be considered a human rights violation. It's arguable that cutting off a town's communication lines should be considered the same way.

You're just being pedantic about what the word right should mean; it's silly. Rights are whatever society agrees them to be, that's it. It's an ever changing mutable list of what people agree to respect, nothing more and nothing less.

Don't say that like it's some long running historical understanding of what the word "right" means. If that is now the definition, it's a new definition much more ambiguous than the old.

A right used to mean something that was passed to you by 'your creator' because of your humanity. A right wasn't something someone else could provide, it was only something we could all defend. Life, liberty, property. Not the work output of another man; that used to be called slavery.

It's not remotely new.

> A right used to mean something that was passed to you by 'your creator' because of your humanity.

No, words don't work that way. The word has always meant both of those things, some people like to use the word that way, and others have always used it in other ways because get this... words have multiple meanings and always have. There was never a time where what you said is true, you're romanticizing and simplify the past as if back then everyone just agree. Guess what, they didn't.

Jeremy Bentham was a defender of legal rights while calling natural rights "nonsense upon stilts". This was in the 1700s.

One of the few comments that gets it, gets downvoted... go figure.

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Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

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