I was stimulated to write by a sign that read “Housing is a human right.” I do not believe this is true. Nor do I believe that food or clothing or health care are human rights, nor anything else which makes a claim on another person.
The American concept of rights, particularly constitutional rights, frame limits on the power of the State to act against or coerce the individual. In this framework, the individual is sovereign. In our system of rights, one person’s rights never impair any other person’s liberty.
The American founders understood rights in the context of natural rights as conceptualized by the enlightenment. Natural rights are connected with individual liberty and autonomy, the concept of the individual as sovereign. Natural rights were not connected with the demands that that an individual might make on the state or other individuals.
People get into trouble when they confuse human needs with human rights. Human needs are many. Some are physical: Food, shelter, medical care. Some are spiritual: love, companionship, purpose. They are all essential for human living and thriving. But none of them can reasonably be defined as rights, except insofar as the sovereign individual may not be impaired by others or by the state in obtaining them.
Importantly, rights as defined by our constitution are not economic goods. In other words, they are not things which involve scarcity. There are not a finite number of free speech rights, which must be allocated among all the people who want them, nor is free speech something that must be created by one person before it can be enjoyed by another.
If housing, food, and medical care are human rights, that means that someone is obligated as a matter of law and logic, to provide those things. If housing is a human right, am I obligated to provide my home to you? Or build you a home? Or pay for your home to be built? Also, am I obligated to offer my home, or build a home, for everyone, everywhere in the world, since they are all humans and have an equal claim on me?
Whenever a society defines rights in terms of economic goods, it gets into trouble. This is obvious in the case of something whose scarcity is obvious. Owning the Mona Lisa is not a human right. But it is different only in degree but not nature, to say that health care is not a human right either. Our society can commit to devoting its resources towards a goal, but it cannot commit unlimited resources since it does not have unlimited resources. Health Care might be something we spend on, but health care cannot be a human right any more than long life can be a human right.
I do not want to live in a society filled with people who are homeless or hungry or lack access to education or medical care. I am willing to join with the rest of my society to try to create the resources to alleviate those needs we can for those who cannot provide those things for themselves. But to call those things human rights is a philosophic and practical error which can only result in governmental oppression of constitutional rights in the pursuit of fictitious “human rights.”
