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Comment by ucosty | Hacker News Reader

I don't think that distinction is particularly useful. 'Negative' rights can be reframed as positive rights, and often need a positive enforcement component to even be useful.

Consider your right for property ownership. Strictly defined as a negative right, others have an obligation not to infringe your property rights. Great if everyone is cooperative, but if somebody violates your rights you need somebody to assert a positive duty.

I'd like to think we've advanced, as a society, enough to consider more than just enforcing survival rights. Would you suggest people should have no rights to education either? This is also a positive right.

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Not OP, but yes, I agree that education is not a right. It's something a society should provide, but it's not a right.

And with a negative right like property, you are free to defend that right yourself, no need for an external force. You can't do that with healthcare or education, which requires someone else's labor to exercise. That's an unjust basis for any service, since all labor should be voluntary.

That's nice. So when the Zetas take your land, it's all good?

Honestly, I think there only really two human rights: the right to property, and the right to do anything that does not directly infringe upon other people’s rights to do the same.

So for example you don’t have the right to: punch someone, murder them, rape, vandalize their property, etc

You do have the right to: drugs, suicide, crying fire in a theater, hurt or kill animals, hate speech, bullying etc.

A lot of these rights I wouldn’t consider morally acceptable (like harassment), but I strongly believe we need to have a distinction between rights and morality.

So right to property means I can burn tires on "my" land and pour benzene into the water table? And property titles are maintained by magic pixies and enforced by private police?

And I love the idea that crying fire in a theater is exercise of a right. I suppose fraud is simply exercising rights?

I think it's funny that people still don't know anything about the case that codified that shouting fire in a crowded theater should be illegal.

Really not the strongest argument when you just give a blase retort with no actual substance.

The corporate media seems to get away with fraud, libel, and slander daily. So probably?

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