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Comment by TeeMassive | Hacker News Reader

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that is just total word salad. Please look up what habeas corpus means. It's right there in wikipedia or any other reference work of your choice. Informed consent is not a right. Those are enumerated also in reference works. Medicine in the united states is essentially the opposite of socialized. Good lord.

Even those pro lockdown could literally only justify it with an unconstitutional suspension of Habeas Corpus.

https://verdict.justia.com/2020/03/15/lock-us-down-suspend-h...

Department of Justice used the precedence of state government lockdowns to gain the power to detain suspects indefinately.

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/21/doj-coronavirus-eme...

You need to look up what it means.

No, but an infectious disease is also limiting on people's freedoms, so it's equally not obvious that those rights override the rights of people to be protected from infectious diseases.

Fundamentally, morally speaking those those aren't facts but opinions. Legally, I think it differs from country to country. Individual rights versus the needs of the state is something that we have really changed perspective on in the last hundred years.

There is no right to protection from infectious disease. It appears nowhere in the US Constitution. There was never any valid moral or legal justification for restricting the 1st Amendment right of freedom of assembly during the pandemic.

Well, that is not quite true at the State level. There are a number of States who have implemented laws that punish transmission of HIV/STDs knowingly. I'll concede there doesn't exist anything at the Federal level that I am aware of.

https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/policies/law/states/exposure.html

I would note that while the US Constitution is a valid authority with regard to legal justification (in the US!), it is very much not with regard to moral justification.

So at least in the US the founding political ideology is based on natural rights and social contract theory. Your conception is closer to patriarchal rights, which is in conflict (at least here in the US).

You're talking about professed ideology (of some), though, which can always be free to ignore reality.

Quarantines and stringent public health measures have been part of the functioning of the US in practice since founding (and before).

What right to be protected from infectious diseases? If it exists then it's been violated my entire life.

We have started charging people with assault for attempting to infect others.

Well, it's not an absolute right (and it's obviously constrained by the limits of what it is even in our power to control). But then neither is the right not to be detained, or really any other right. All rights run into limits when they come into conflict with other rights.

I think it was a witness test of people's moral philosophy. Rights are fundamentally philosophical position, not a law of physics.

Those that favor preserving negative rights over positive rights generally objected to the lockdown.

In general, people who favor negative rights do so because they don't come into conflict with each other. Positive rights come into conflict with other positive rights and negative rights, and require trade-offs

I agree. My personal perspective is that I fundamentally don't agree that negative rights don't conflict with each other, or that there is a meaningful difference between positive and negative rights (which is of course a philosophical position that not everybody will agree with).

Negative rights not conflicting with each other is the main and perhaps only factor that distinguishes them from positive rights, so if you don't think that is true, of course you won't find a difference.

When it comes to practical implementation, the tools used to maintain negative rights are the same as the tools used to maintain positive rights, so they appear very similar.

If you're familiar with the concept, you probably already know that negative rights prohibit other people from actions, while positive rights require other people to take actions.

I'm curious why you think this distinction is not valid.

Consider two possible rights:

(1) The right to complete freedom of movement.

(2) The right to private personal space free of other people

On the face of things, neither of these require anybody to take actions. Nevertheless, one cannot fully exercise (1) without violating (2) and vice versa.

Interesting I think that is a great example of why and how the concept of personal property (bodily or material) is necessary to make negative rights consistent.

Also, the first right seems more like a positive right guaranteeing an entitlement to do or have access to something.

But people were also free and supported to stay inside if they were afraid of getting infected. This logic doesn't hold up here.

People are free to stay inside if they're afraid of getting sick. Rights can only be overridden if and only if there are no other choices, which is not the case here. Me getting to an hospital doesn't limit someone else's freedom.

Thousands of people going to the hospital at the same time due to a preventable phenomenon certainly limits the freedom of lots of people to continue living when those hospitals are overrun and unable to provide care. We had already tried a few months of the "let everyone decide individually and hope for the best" approach and the problem kept worsening superlinearly.

> People are free to stay inside if they're afraid of getting sick

By that logic, people are free to stay inside if I'm standing outside their door with a gun and they don't want to be shot. Yes, they're free to stay inside, but they're not free to go outside.

I think it's reasonable to believe that the rights of free movement override the rights to be protected from diseases in this case, but I don't think you can argue that via a general principle of rights. I think you have to argue that based on the specific consequences, and on your personal values.

Are rights like habeas corpus and free and informed consent overridden in a time of war?

Lincoln did it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habeas_Corpus_Suspension_Act_(....

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