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Comment by mgbmtl | Hacker News Reader

All rights subjective and temporal. Just take the question of freedom of speech, and how that evolves in time, how it varies between countries (even between allied countries, such as the US and Canada).

One could argue that the desire for an increased level of comfort of one set of people should not happen at the detriment of the right to clean water, for example, of another set of people. Many countries will have their own standards, or their own double-standards. I think it's a very relevant debate.

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As in this case, the "right" to clean water (or any other exhaustible resource) makes no sense -- at least if described in such blunt terms.

Hypothetically, what happens in a drought, when there is no water for anyone? Have your rights been violated? If so, by whom?

If it's rather described as a right to nondiscrimination in the distribution of clean water (with respect to some set of properties, which could include wealth or ability to pay, but likely couldn't include large-scale geographic location due to distribution logistics), then that actually starts to make sense and can be realistically debated.

You're raising interesting questions. It's a hard topic, but I think it's inevitable that we will have to tackle some of those questions. Sometimes we want to avoid a debate because we don't know the solution, but a good debate helps us find a solution.

Not trying to deflect, just disagreeing with the OP's comment that such debates are BS.

> Hypothetically, what happens in a drought, when there is no water for anyone? Have your rights been violated?

If the government had a reasonable way of preventing that and didn't, I'd say yes. Otherwise, no.

> If so, by whom?

By whoever was in charge of maintaining your water supply (government again), or nobody if this wasn't doable.

A government violates your rights when it fails to take action to protect them.

> We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

I know this isn't part of the Bill of Rights, but the idea that humans have a right to life isn't very controversial. If there were a situation where the water ran out in an isolated town, and the local government had a big water tower with enough clean drinking water for everyone, we'd absolutely say the people have a "right" to that water.

There are fringe cases, sure, but if people are going to literally die without a thing, and the government has the capacity to provide it, and the government is actually "by the people, of the, people for the people," I think the people have a right to that thing by extension.

What you are describing falls under what I described in my last paragraph.

There's a difference between a right, which is an expression of an ideal — what a person may not be deprived of by virtue of being human — and how protection for that right is implemented in practice under different governments. That is, the varying extents to which governments respect a given right doesn't mean the right differs by country, only that those governments disagree on how to infringe on it.

We might then agree that "the protection of rights is subjective and temporal". I think the basic argument still holds: such topics should be debated :)

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