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Comment by shock-value | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

> 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.

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.

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