Theodore Dalrymple is in the Journal this morning talking about the imaginary “right” to healthcare.
Excellent line here, because it’s exactly the same strawman argument that many people are making in the debate in the United States currently when lamenting the plight of the uninsured:
When the supposed right to health care is widely recognized, as in the United Kingdom, it tends to reduce moral imagination. Whenever I deny the existence of a right to health care to a Briton who asserts it, he replies, “So you think it is all right for people to be left to die in the street?”
When I then ask my interlocutor whether he can think of any reason why people should not be left to die in the street, other than that they have a right to health care, he is generally reduced to silence. He cannot think of one.
It’s a good piece, although I would hope that anything titled, “There is no ‘Right’ to Health Care” could do a slightly better job at actually proving the assertion at hand. That said, what he does do a good job at is demonstrating how “free” does not necessarily equal “good” under the universal system that they have in Britain.
Dalrymple and Britain aside, some late night surfing last night led me to The Public Philosopher and this post on the same subject. I guess you’re only a real philosopher if you ignore those who came before you and instead try to think for yourself and come up with convoluted lines of thought on your own:
If human rights are about protecting autonomy, then people are not autonomous when they are gravely ill. If the government is to be concerned with autonomy-as all liberal ones are-it has to draw the line somewhere. It cannot guarantee full autonomy, for nobody has that-it’s impossible to be a completely free being, one who can will whatever he wishes and have it without any effort and in no time. But people’s existence as moral entities depends upon their ability to make free choices, as does their status as happy, functioning, maybe even flourishing individuals. So, people need a lot of autonomy even if full autonomy is impossible.
Given this, the government must draw a line in the gradient of autonomy from lowest autonomy (slavery or, possibly, death) to highest autonomy (God) and declare that above this line: that person is considered free or at least, that is the amount of freedom everyone deserves by virtue of being human. It is quite reasonable to me to draw the line above healthcare, or at least above certain grave illnesses, which if one has, he loses much of his ability to make free choices and engage with the world, since he lacks energy, is wracked with worry, can only focus on recuperation, may even die, etc. I discussed similar issues in a post arguing that same-sex marriage was not a human right.
He gets points for originality, and the “increasing autonomy” bit does make a certain level of sense with regard to the protection and exhortation of individuals in our culture, but it fails in one regard. Here’s the response that I wrote in the comments to that post:
I would think that someone who calls himself a “public philosopher” might be at least a tiny bit familiar with John Locke, on whose ideas a vast portion of our governmental system is based.
This one is actually very simple: an individual’s rights only extend as far as his own self. A right is something you already have that can’t be taken away.
It can’t be a right if it has to be given to you, because then, by definition, it has to have been taken from someone else and thus is a violation of that person’s rights.
You can argue that it’s “government” that’s giving the healthcare, which many people want to do in this debate, but in that scenario either the government is compelling healthcare providers to give away their services for less than their full market worth or the government is taking wealth (property) from some other citizen to pay the doctor to provide care to a 3rd party.
Either scenario fails the test.
Not to mention that anything that’s given can ALWAYS be taken away.
I’ll stand by that.
