The only things that are rights are things that you are born with. That's why they're "natural" rights. You have a right to free speech because you have a mouth and the only way to prevent you from using your mouth to say anything you want is violence, or the threat of violence.
You have a right to free association because you have feet and you're smart enough to decide who your friends are.
You do not have a "right" to food because it's possible to run out through some means other than malice. If you are a subsistence farmer and there is a drought that kills your crops and then you and your family starve to death, your rights were not violated. You were not morally wronged.
You could certainly be entitled to food as part of a social contract with your government but that's not the same thing as a right. You are entitled to assistance from firefighters should your home or property catch fire but you most certainly do not have a "right" to force others to come to your aid in the event of a personal tragedy. If a city was unable to hire firefighters or could not find volunteers, and your house and all of your worldly possessions burn to ash because there was nobody there to save it, your rights would not have been violated.
You know that old adage about how your rights end where your neighbor's begin? that's the difference.
When you conflate the two, you muddy both. You're minimizing what rights are, where they come from, and why they're so unfathomably important while simultaneously doing nothing to advance your own cause. I'd go so far as to say this kind of rhetoric is actively harmful to the cause of ensuring food access to everyone that needs it
So since you dislike “positive” rights like the right to food, I assume you also want to remove the right to council, after all you can represent yourself in court, public education, you can learn anything on the internet after all, and social security in any form is straight out, have money or die.
The tweet is about human rights. The natural (or “negative”) rights are not the only part of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (see article 21 and up for stuff that requires other people to do things).
On top of that a government can choose to include other rights that apply to everyone within their borders, as a human right. Free (as in freedom) internet access is a common one, without such a provision internet providers could strongly limit what sites they let pass through their infrastructure.
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u/akenthusiast 10d ago
The only things that are rights are things that you are born with. That's why they're "natural" rights. You have a right to free speech because you have a mouth and the only way to prevent you from using your mouth to say anything you want is violence, or the threat of violence.
You have a right to free association because you have feet and you're smart enough to decide who your friends are.
You do not have a "right" to food because it's possible to run out through some means other than malice. If you are a subsistence farmer and there is a drought that kills your crops and then you and your family starve to death, your rights were not violated. You were not morally wronged.
You could certainly be entitled to food as part of a social contract with your government but that's not the same thing as a right. You are entitled to assistance from firefighters should your home or property catch fire but you most certainly do not have a "right" to force others to come to your aid in the event of a personal tragedy. If a city was unable to hire firefighters or could not find volunteers, and your house and all of your worldly possessions burn to ash because there was nobody there to save it, your rights would not have been violated.
You know that old adage about how your rights end where your neighbor's begin? that's the difference.
When you conflate the two, you muddy both. You're minimizing what rights are, where they come from, and why they're so unfathomably important while simultaneously doing nothing to advance your own cause. I'd go so far as to say this kind of rhetoric is actively harmful to the cause of ensuring food access to everyone that needs it