Query:
Because of the general duty to love our neighbors, I think that as a matter of public policy there must be rights to have certain goods -- in one sense of the term, "positive" rights. What do you think?
Reply:
I think that by a positive right, you don’t mean a right to do something (for example worship or buy property), and you don’t mean a right to be free from having something done to you (for example be beaten or murdered), but a right to get something at the expense of someone else. You don’t mean a right to receive it because you paid for it (as at the checkout counter of the grocery), but a right to receive it just because you ought to have it. Presumably, since you consider it not just a good thing, but a real right, you also mean that considerations such as how you will use it are irrelevant: We shouldn’t consider whether you will use it to feed your family, to get off the street, or to feed your drug habit. Again, there would be little point in calling it a right if you meant only that other people ought to have compassion so that they voluntarily give it to you. The language of rights suggests that they have or should have a duty to do so – and since you are thinking of public policy, you must be thinking of a legally enforceable duty to do so.
Surely there are some rights like that. Our mothers and fathers, for example, have the right to be honored by us. Thomas Aquinas calls the duty to honor them an “affirmative” obligation, by contrast with, say, the duty not to steal, which is a “negative” obligation. He points out, though, that negative duties necessarily extend further than affirmative ones, and I think he’s right. Although I can completely fulfil the duty never to steal, I cannot possibly do everything which would give honor my parents, because there is an infinite number of such things. If I tried to do so, then I would be forced to neglect my other duties. My parents couldn’t have a right to be honored in that infinite sense -- even though none of the honor I can give them could ever come even close to repaying what they have done for me.
Just for this reason, what you call positive rights -- rights to receive something -- must be associated with negative duties. Although I can’t say “I must do everything which honors my mother,” at least I can say “I may never do anything contrary to honoring her.” But here’s another problem: Pinning down in rules what these negatives are isn’t easy. Surely it would dishonor my mother to mock her or let her go hungry. There could even be legal penalties for that. But would it dishonor her not to give her a call this afternoon? This definitional difficulty makes it easier to speak in terms of virtues than in terms of tightly nailed down rules and rights. Though I can’t spell out ahead of time all the things I must do and not do for my mother, I should surely cultivate the virtue of filial piety. This is the constant will to do her whatever honor is possible and fitting in the circumstances.
Of course, people who propose what you call positive rights are usually thinking not of things like the honor due to parents, but of things like food – things which we need. Right away we face the difficulty of defining these needs.
I don’t doubt the need to eat, but what about, say, higher education? Can everyone benefit from higher education? Would a right to higher education mean that no one should have to pay, or at least that no one who could benefit from it should have to pay? But someone would pay – the cost would presumably be borne by everyone else, through taxation. Here’s the rub: Although everyone would pay these taxes, not everyone does go to college. Thus, working class parents would end up covering part of the costs of education for the children of professional and upper-class parents. In other words, making education free would amount to a transfer of wealth from the more needy to the less needy. Would that be fair? In fact, couldn’t it even be viewed as an egregious violation of the rights of the hard-working folk at the bottom of the scale whose wealth is taken away? Another point which is not discussed as often as it should be is that the provision of a governmental tuition subsidy also enables colleges to raise tuition by the average amount of the subsidy. If you want to know why college is so expensive, there’s a big fat reason. College would be much cheaper today if government hadn’t “helped.”
And what else counts as a need? Of course not, say, recreation. But wait! Are we sure of that? Doesn’t everyone need to relax? So why shouldn’t we call recreation a need? By the way, colleges and universities, which we already subsidize, provide a lot of recreation: Music, sports, movies, art galleries, gymnasiums, swimming pools, exercise equipment, and all sorts of other things. Student life is a little like socialism, and a little like Club Med, but with exams. I know my students won’t like my saying that, but it’s true.
To simplify, suppose we limit positive rights to just a few – say the big four, food, clothing, housing, and health care. We need to have food when we are hungry, clothing when we are naked, shelter when we are homeless, and medicine when we are sick. One might think that by reducing what we call needs to just these four, the affirmative duty of compassion would be easy to translate into enforceable negative duties. “At least we must never omit to provide just these four things,” we might say. But no: Translation is just as difficult in the case of these obvious needs.
For example, we should certainly look for ways to ameliorate homelessness, and there are lots of concrete things we can do. If anyone thinks I don’t think so, they are sorely mistaken. But suppose we say there is an enforceable positive right to shelter. How then would we enforce it? Dorothy Day wrote that the problem of poverty would be solved if each family took in a homeless person, but I don’t think even Dorothy Day would have said that each family has a legally enforceable duty to take in a homeless person. In fact, Day was deeply skeptical of the state. What she actually did was more sensible: She set up Houses of Hospitality, as different as possible from state shelters and as much like family homes as possible. And yet needless to say, even apart from the fact that there weren’t enough of them, the Houses of Hospitality couldn’t help everyone. They couldn’t help people who were too dangerous to be taken in. Nor could they help people who refused to be taken in just because they didn’t like having rules. Were the rights of such people therefore violated? I don’t see how we can say such a thing.
For another example, we shouldn’t want people to starve, and I am all for giving that fellow on the street in front of the church something to eat. But suppose we say that everyone has an enforceable positive right to, say, bread. One of my old economics professors used to ask what would happen if bread were priced at zero. It’s easy to see that the demand for bread would skyrocket. People would take more than they needed, and even people who weren’t hungry would grab some, just because they didn’t have to pay for it. Wasted bread would litter the streets. Just to produce more and more bread, resources would have to be diverted from the production of other things people need. A socialist at the time, I was profoundly disturbed not to have an answer to this problem.
Another difficulty is that my enforceable right to P is unspecified unless we say who has the enforceable duty to give me P – and the right isn’t fully specified even then. Do we say that each person has an individual duty to do certain things for his neighbor? Then which things? Or do we say that the state has the duty – for instance, that there should be something like universal health insurance, or socialized medicine? Economists suggest that the cost of having a good or service provided by the government is generally about twice what it would be to have it provided by private means. As Thomas Borcherding put it in his book Budgets and Bureaucrats: The Sources of Government Growth, “removal of an activity from the private to the public sector will double its unit costs of production.” If this “Bureaucratic Rule of Two” is correct, then although collectivizing the duty might make it possible to help more people, none would be helped as well.
The quality of care would be further reduced by the fact that providers would no longer have to compete. Moreover, just as with free bread, free medical care would cause demand to become infinite, so not only would there be long waits, but there would inevitably have to be strict rationing. Note well: In a culture of death, like ours, rationing takes the form of pressure to kill the very young, the very old, and the very weak. We see this to some degree even with private insurance.
Or do we say that P should be provided neither by each individual, nor by the state, but by churches, synagogues, and voluntary organizations? Perhaps we should provide food and health care the way Day’s Houses of Hospitality provided shelter. Marvin Olasky points out in his fascinating book The Tragedy of American Compassion that in the past, almost all aid to poor persons in the United State was given by communities of worship. Their first act was to reconnect them with their families and integrate them with the community, and they not only gave them material help, but also expected things of them.
Even now, many churches run such things as charity clinics and soup kitchens, and I am sure these are good things. But then we have to ask whether, in running all these operations, churches and other voluntary organizations should rely on private contributions alone, or receive state assistance. If they don’t receive state assistance, then they won’t be able to help as many people -- should we then say that the rights of those whom they couldn’t help had been violated? But if they do receive state assistance, then immediately the state attaches strings to it -- strings which may be unacceptable. “Sorry, no prayers over the food!”
Don’t laugh. Often the state has tried to impose onerous rules on religious schools receiving tuition vouchers through school choice programs. Moreover, once tied to the apron of the state, churches will begin to adopt the state’s own model of how to help needy people: Not as embodied immortal souls, but as soulless bodies: As though people were nothing but stuff, and people needed nothing but stuff. We might say that this doesn’t have to happen, and I suppose it doesn’t. But it has happened, and the reasons aren’t obscure.
Finally, the form of the right needs to be specified. Would having an enforceable positive right to food, for example, mean a right to have food given to me? Or would it mean a right to the chance to work for my food if I am able? Getting what I need for free, even if I can work for it, saps responsibility, breeds dependency, and undermines marital and family structure. This is why some government antipoverty programs seem to hurt the poor at least as much as they help them.
Perhaps a right to work for my bread would be more in the spirit of St. Paul’s command and exhortation to the Thessalonians. “For even when we were with you,” he wrote, “we gave you this command: If anyone will not work, let him not eat. For we hear that some of you are living in idleness, mere busybodies, not doing any work. Now such persons we command and exhort in the Lord Jesus Christ to do their work in quietness and to earn their own living.” But what if I say I can’t find a job, even though there are lots of jobs to be had?
And do we take my word for it? A volunteer in a Christian charity once told me that a number of the genuinely needy women whom she had assisted were supporting able-bodied adult sons who could have worked, but chose not to. When she suggested that their sons should be supporting them, rather than they, their sons, they were quick to make excuses for them, saying that jobs are scarce. And yes, jobs are scarce for those who won’t work.
Further, what if I can find a job, but can’t hold one? To make the right to a job meaningful, do I have a right to job training? To make the right to job training meaningful, do I have a right to be educated in good work habits? Since disordered families make the acquisition of good work habits less likely, do I have a right to a good family? How on earth will that right be satisfied? Do I have a right that my family be policed by the government? Imagine a bureaucrat giving you rules about the kids’ chores.
For all such reasons, although acting with compassion is certainly a general duty -- in the sense that neglecting our neighbors is a grave sin -- I don’t think this general duty can be translated entirely into specific, enforceable positive rights. Rights talk is of no help here. It seems better to view compassion as a virtue, as a habit of the heart, which keeps us in perpetual readiness to give what help is possible and appropriate.
Related:
Free Stuff and Aspirational Rights