Right to Life Redux

A bit of a long double today. Sorry that it took so long!

Last week, I introduced the idea of the right to life and how it might extend beyond the basics of survival. We talked about food, water, healthcare, and even government responsibility in preventing long-term harm like pollution. The point was to establish a spectrum of implications of a right to life. I think it’s kind of impossible to draw a fine line, but we can try that, and think about other solutions if we can’t get anywhere with that. 

The first solution is just to draw the line at plain killing--the government ought to only outlaw actions that directly threaten life, like killing someone in any violent form. But there are categories beyond that form of a life being taken away. If I were to separate them it would be something like this:

Positive death - dying as a direct result of another’s actions - e.g. being shot, poisened, drowning, overdosing

Negative death - dying as a result of not having something. Although positive death is, at its core, the same thing (i.e. we die from being strangled because of a lack of air), these forms are have notably less human involvement - e.g starvation, untreated illness

Second-hand death- dying as a result of causes that may or may not play a facture in a premature death - e.g. smoking or other forms of drug abuse, long-term malnourishment

From the way I’ve divided it, it seems the government has the first two categories covered--the CJS prosecutes those who invade the negative rights associated with positive death, and government agencies provide resources to those who don’t have the money to avoid forms of negative death, which suggests American citizens having a positive right to those causes of death (I guess I named those categories poorly). It gets tricky when you think about the third category, and I think it’s interesting to contemplate whether you think the government should intervene on behalf of avoiding those causes of death (I will leave the conclusion of that thinking to you). 

But here’s another implication: if those other outcomes that the government must prevent stem from the right to life, does that mean all those other rights are God-given? Did God give us a right to get treatment for a fatal illness? Or a right for shelter if our life is at stake? Sounds kinda strange.

And this is where I remind you that not every philosophical framework revolves around rights given to use by God.

Instead, try thinking about rights as something the government gives us (i.e. that humans give each other (btw, for more discussion on the social contract and the idea of rights and their inalienability, see Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau)). There is still morality given by God, but don’t think of it within the framework of rights. So, instead of thinking of murder as violation of the right to life, think of murder as a universal wrong. I know those two ideas sound like the same thing, but they are different because the rights one is other-regarding and revolves around the idea that we owe or never ought to owe something to each other, whereas the moral wrong one is simply a rule. 

Thus, there might be another way for a Catholic to answer that question I asked last week: do we have rights? Maybe I do as an American citizen, but maybe not as a human made in the image and likeness of God. Just a thought!