Will Wilkinson - Latest Comments in Is Poverty a Violation of Human Rights?

Re: Is Poverty a Violation of Human Rights?

humorous_duet_acting — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 04:25:14 -0000

This is the great blog, I'm reading them for a while, thanks for the new posts!

Re: Is Poverty a Violation of Human Rights?

Tracy W — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 05:55:33 -0000

What is your definition of human rights?
To quote Wikipedia: the "basic rights and freedoms to which all humans are entitled".
Do we have a right to a traditional way of life? When has a way of life gone on long enough to become traditional? Are efforts to stop the Norwegians and Japanese from whaling a violation of their human rights because they have a traditional right to a way of life? Do people have a right to vaccum-cleaner mechanised fishing methods, even if they destroy the fishing stocks?

The NZ government introduced individual transferrable fishing quotas to manage the rights to fish that were common by tradition. Was that a violation of human rights?

Water rights often cause conflict. Say that upstream communities in a river have always had a right to 10,000 cubic metres of water for their farming, but climate change means that river levels are running low and they are taking too much water. Is changing their rights to water a violation of human rights?

Let's say an organisation wants to build a power station to supply a hospital with electricity, thus increasing access to healthcare in the local community. The options boil down to a hydro-run system, affecting water use, or a thermal station removing a main source of drinking water, or no power station (it's not windy enough for wind power). Is making those tough decisions a violation of human rights? In that situation, how do you avoid not violating someone's rights?

How about the world gets serious about climate change, and massively cuts back on coal use, thus throwing coal miners' traditional way of life into disarray in the name of the environment? Is that a violation of human rights?

Is there some special reason to favour a minimum living wage legislation, when many people earning the minimum wage are teenagers or otherwise not dependent on it, and many poor people can't work at all, as opposed to a minimum income subsidy paid to keep people above a poverty level? Is someone who advocates a universal basic income rather than a minimum wage really advocating a policy of violating human rights, or are they just disagreeing about how to do things?

Human rights are great if they can be applied to everyone, but it doesn't strike me that they're great ways to manage problems of resource allocation (property rights have far more advantages).

Re: Is Poverty a Violation of Human Rights?

TGGP — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 16:09:22 -0000

The second paragraph assumes for the sake of argument that there are rights.

Re: Is Poverty a Violation of Human Rights?

Hunter — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 15:26:53 -0000

Will, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this piece:
http://www.thefreemanonline...

Re: Is Poverty a Violation of Human Rights?

Tracy W — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 11:32:32 -0000

But we don't know what are the institutions that create the conditions under which opportunities to create wealth are maximised. It strikes me as entirely possible that even the richest country in the world has not achieved institutions that can maximise wealth.
Furthermore, the institutions that appear to create wealth quite plausibly vary from culture to culture, eg history in some countries might mean that a political settlement can only be stable under institutions that are just not needed in countries with a different history. For example, Northern Ireland apparently has undergone streneous efforts to keep the police force balanced between Protestants and Catholics, a matter which the rest of the Anglo-speaking world doesn't appear to worry about. But how do we know? Balancing the police force may impose costs relative to those in societies that don't have to worry about it, but still be necessary to avoid another round of wealth-destroying terrorism in Northern Ireland - in other words the benefits might outweigh the costs in the case of Northern Ireland. So we can't look to cross-country comparisons to tell us what institutions generate wealth in any particular case. So reasonable people could easily disagree about what institutions are required in a culture to generate wealth, let alone what insitutions are required to maximise it.

And if we can't agree on how to implement a right, what's the point of declaring it a right? What's the point in declaring that I, or a government, has a moral obligation to do something if there's no broad social consensus on what that something is, and no remotely objective way to say whether or not someone is actually meeting their moral obligation to provide such a right?

Negative rights do generate hard cases where it's not clear where the obligations lie (eg people who want to exercise their freedom of speech to disrupt funerals), but positive rights seem to me to be all hard cases.

Re: Is Poverty a Violation of Human Rights?

Murali — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 03:32:58 -0000

If I may butt in? I think that Jay is looking for the distinction between duties od right and duties of virtue. Duties of right are formal and can be enforced by law while duties of virtue are more substantive claims which cannot be enforced by law.

Of course, not all formal obligations are enforced. Use of force often is, but fraud isnt. No-one is arrested for telling his wife that the dress does not make her look fat (when in fact it does), or for having an affair, or for lying about a number of other issues (though adultery can result in a civil case, it is not criminally prosecutable). The only times lying is criminalised is in cases of fraud, or perjury

This of course calls up the standard libertarian force/fraud duet into question. It sems like only some kinds fraud are criminal, the legal fraud is ostensibly private. Which brings us to the conclusion that while the bedroom is private, the board room is not necessarily so. Or if the board room is private, it is private in ways that do not prevent us from regulating it.

I'm relying on the assumption here that no libertarian is going to criminalise adultery or decriminalise fraud. (So any libertarian who will, please sound off and we can have a rousing argument)

There is also the issue that there isnt probably any government which has not tries its hand (and to this day still does) try to enforce duties of virtue. Of course, the fact that no libertarian government exists is not a reason to not pursue libertarian policies.

Of course, that said, there is obviously some class of violations like murder and rape which we have duties to prevent as well as punish. The social contract is one of the ways in which we execute these moral duties. Or in a state of nature, or anarchic society, you are morally required to protect your neighbour from rape, murder, assault or fraud/ or even make retribution on the perpetrators of these wrongs.

The question that is raised in will's post is whether we have a formal moral duty to prevent our neighbour from starving to death (it if it is the case that he does not want to starve to death) The matter of distant people is taken care of at thr instance of state formation. Ubiquitous state formation, in theory, will take care of the problem of protection. If at least everybody is subject to some state or another, everybody's rights are being protected (at least in theory) What to do about states which fail to do the job is tangential to this issue, and not necessarily reliant on whether or not we have a formal duty to support starving neighbours

Re: Is Poverty a Violation of Human Rights?

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 01:20:04 -0000

I just reached for my gun because you reached for your gun first!

Re: Is Poverty a Violation of Human Rights?

TGGP — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 01:11:21 -0000

I'm an enthusiast for apathy, I think we rarely get to hear its case made.

When I hear people talk about reaching for impossible dreams, I reach for my gun. But I reach for my gun for any damn reason.

Re: Is Poverty a Violation of Human Rights?

Greg N. — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 21:29:13 -0000

"We do our duty, we act to protect the human rights of the world’s poor, by establishing policies of maximum openness and inclusion. We would thereby bring multitudes of abused people under the protection of decent schemes of rights, create robust and enriching ties of trade, and create stronger incentives for poor jurisdictions to respect and maintain the conditions for prosperity and flourishing."

That's pretty much what I was getting at. I really need to read the whole post before I comment.

Re: Is Poverty a Violation of Human Rights?

Jaybird — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 19:37:32 -0000

Not paying that wage would be a violation of the law.

Not necessarily a violation of Human Rights.

Human Rights and the law have a relationship, sure... but it isn't close to a 1:1 kinda thing.

Re: Is Poverty a Violation of Human Rights?

Arun — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 19:03:03 -0000

If the law of the land is to provide a minimum wage for any labor, not paying that would be a human rights violation, I think.

Would not having a minimum living wage law be a human rights violation?

Would coercing peasants in various ways to produce cash crops instead of food crops (and leaving peasants to starve when cash crop prices crash) not constitute a human rights violation?

Would rich farmers' building of a dam in an arid region to impound water to irrigate rice crops, thereby making water unavailable for peasants' subsistence crops constitute a human rights violation?

Would a multinational company's building of a power plant but thereby polluting the main source of drinking water for the local population (and not doing anything to replace the common good so denied) constitute a human rights violation?

Fishermen communities in India have lived on the coast for centuries, feeding themselves by catch from the coastal area. Would the government allowing vacuum-cleaner mechanized fishing methods that clear the area within the fishermen's reach of catch constitute a human rights violation?

If you say poverty in general - its causes are manifold, just like war. Is war a human rights violation? But there are innumerable instances where a traditional way of life - precarious but not poverty-stricken - is thrown into disarray in the name of progress, free-market, etc. There is the taking of goods that were common by tradition and privatizing them. Is this a violation of human rights?

Re: Is Poverty a Violation of Human Rights?

Greg N. — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 17:51:54 -0000

We don't think a society is completely unjust when rights are violated every once in a while, as long as the institutions are designed to protect rights, and respect for rights is the norm, we tend to think that - at least with respect to rights claims - society is doing its job. We expect everyone to "chip in" to pay for the institutions that protect rights and keep us out of Hobbesian anarchy, and, at least in theory, we do our best to minimize rights violations with due process, etc. When rights violations become routine, or when the institutions are perverted and no longer respect rights, then we say the society is unjust and call for a change. But the point is we judge a society by its institutions and its approach to rights, including whether that society has set up the right institutions and pursues the right policies that will most likely result in the respect for rights, not whether every person's rights are respected 100% of the time (I think this was Jefferson's point with the "long train of abuses" line).

Perhaps wealth can be thought of the same way. Instead of arguing that every person has a right to a particular amount of money, perhaps we can say that every person has a right to the set of institutions that will most likely create the conditions under which wealth can be created, and wherein any given person will likely find herself above the poverty line at any given time.

Negative rights aren't protected in a Hobbesian anarchy. They require a particular set of institutions for their meaningful realization, and most libertarians are ok with small rights "violations" (e.g., taxation) to create the set of institutions most likely to protect their liberty generally. In other words, even libertarians don't think of rights in absolute terms. We think of them as a useful term for the condition under which government doesn't meaningfully interfere with an individual's pursuit of the good, or substitute its own ends for the individual's.

So, if we think of rights not as this thing and that thing in need of protection like the Magna Carta at the Archives, but rather a general condition of liberty, then there's no reason NOT to include wealth, because all that means is that people have a right to institutions that create the conditions under which the opportunities to create wealth are maximized (e.g., free trade), in the same way that they have a right to the set of conditions that maximizes their ability to pursue their own ends (e.g., due process).

That probably made no sense whatsoever.

Re: Is Poverty a Violation of Human Rights?

Jaybird — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 12:49:36 -0000

You misunderstand my question.

I am not asking if gay marriage is moral. I don't care.

I am asking what makes your use of the paragraph, and here I will quote you again, different from other folks using the paragraph.

Here's what you said:

"But what alternative? People need little excuse to abdicate any moral obligation at all. What if the choice is piety or apathy? I'll take piety, thanks. And I don't think that the fact that something is impossible means we have no obligation to pursue it. In fact, I think impossible pursuits are some of our most important."

I am saying that I can see this paragraph prefacing some awful, *AWFUL* policies (among them: gay marriage).

I am saying that I cannot see the difference between your use of this paragraph (to serve moral precepts X) and the use of those other, wickeder, folks use of it (to serve immoral precepts Y).

When you say "your post would be flatly unworkable as a statement of practical politics."

I am saying this: It does not seem to be particularly unworkable. The people in the examples I provided give examples of exactly how "workable" it is.

Again: What makes your use of the paragraph of yours that I quoted and their use of it?

(For the record, I see "troll behavior" as "talking about the person making the post" rather than "talking about the arguments the people are making". I am asking you about stuff that you posted. I am not talking about you. Please answer the questions I am asking or, at least, say "you know what, I'm not going to answer that". Thank you.)

Re: Is Poverty a Violation of Human Rights?

Tiago Moreira Ramalho — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 12:49:25 -0000

What a briliant essay! Really. I wrote something similar about the African poverty probem. It is in Portuguese, so it would be useless to send you. Anyway, congrats! This is exactly what I think about this issue.

(sorry about the rough English)

Tiago M. Ramalho

Re: Is Poverty a Violation of Human Rights?

chrismealy — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 12:40:26 -0000

The rights argument sets the bar too high. There are plenty of projects that aren't rights-based that are still worthwhile.

Re: Is Poverty a Violation of Human Rights?

Freddie — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 12:24:06 -0000

Again, you're simply not engaging the question at hand. Whether or not gay marriage is immoral is irrelevant to the question at hand, which is the proper situating of morality talk and rights talk in this context. As usual, you're far better at criticizing than you are at offering anything resembling a workable argument. Even if I felt that gay marriage was even remotely analogous to rape in any logical way, your post would be flatly unworkable as a statement of practical politics. The clear suggestion from what you've said, after all, is that if you don't believe in a moral duty to prevent gay marriage, there isn't a moral obligation to prevent rape. Which is nonsense, as well you know. But you rest assured in the idea that you can say it's about me-- not you, me!-- and not bother to generate internally consistent arguments. Which is consistent with your general behavior, which is to try and snipe and snark, but prove utterly unable to present a coherent argument of your own when called to the canvas.

And listen, slick, it doesn't take psychoanalyzing to call bullshit on bullshit.

Re: Is Poverty a Violation of Human Rights?

JMW — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 11:32:52 -0000

I didn't posit a choice between apathy and piety. I posited a choice between reality and not-reality. I'm not defending apathy, though that's also a right, I suppose.

Re: Is Poverty a Violation of Human Rights?

Neel Krishnaswami — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 11:26:41 -0000

Actually, I do think many cases of pointing out cognitive dissonance are dishonest and wrong.

This is because the relationship between speech and knowledge is very complex. When someone says a sentence S, it's almost never the case that they mean the propositional content of S! This is because S is nearly always false as stated -- there will be a host of unspoken qualifications necessary to make it true.

For example, if someone asks you how to turn on the light, and you say "flipping that light switch will turn on the light", this sentence is wrong. For it to be actually true, you need to add a host of qualifications to it: the wiring needs to still be intact, the power must currently be on, the bulb needs to be un-burnt-out, and so on, ad infinitum. (This is called "the qualification problem" in AI research, and it's a very serious technical obstacle!)

Of course, because it's practically impossible to state all the qualifications, we never do. This makes "Socratic muggings" possible: in a dialogue, we have to assent to technically false propositions, because otherwise we can't get started. So someone arguing in bad faith can start taking your statements literally in order to derive an absurd conclusion, in order to force the psychological process of cognitive dissonance to kick in. So, as a matter of practical rhetoric, you can get people to give up beliefs for bad or insufficient reasons.

Of course, it's also the case that we all do believe many things for insufficient reasons, or which are false. So some uses of dialectic leading to contradiction are justified.

Re: Is Poverty a Violation of Human Rights?

Jaybird — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 11:16:52 -0000

As much as I appreciate the free psychoanalysis, I'd more like to get back to the topic at hand... which is the whole is this paragraph something that ought to be used before we have the government do something or not?

Here, I'll post the paragraph again:

Now, when I read that paragraph, my eyes widen and I think about the huge number of things that it can, and has, been used to justify.

I'll ask you directly:

What makes your use of this particular paragraph different?

The follow-up question would be this: how in the hell can you *NOT* talk about what is moral when you (You, Freddie, not me... you.) bring up the importance of, let me quote this word to you, "piety" when it comes to social action?

Re: Is Poverty a Violation of Human Rights?

Freddie — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 11:02:14 -0000

It's not different; it's a complete non sequitur. You're talking about disputes regarding what is and isn't moral, which, while interesting, and a big part of our political dialogue, has nothing to do with what we're talking about here. So why do you bring it up? Because you have this never-ceasing tendency to want to drop some irrelevant gotcha on me. I'm not interested in disputing whether gay marriage or whatever else is moral, and you know very well my opinion on that question. We're talking about the consequences of moral talk and positive rights.

If you want to talk like a grownup, I'm all for it, but when you constantly leap back and forth between your serious foot and your troll foot, it's tiring, and I'm not inclined to participate.

Re: Is Poverty a Violation of Human Rights?

Jaybird — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 10:56:32 -0000

I could see this particular speech prefacing a whole mess of initiatives.

Holding signs in front of Planned Parenthood...
Explaining how marriage is between a man and a woman...
Explaining how obscene music and art needs to be banned...

Hey. You want to be amoral and apathetic and say that gays should be allowed to be married, that's fine. Those of us who are pious and understand Man's relationship with God's Creation can do the heavy lifting of keeping society intact against the seemingly inevitable tide of "progressivism". With the help of our lord and savior Jesus Christ, we will overcome.

Or would you say "that's different"?

Re: Is Poverty a Violation of Human Rights?

Freddie — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 10:37:12 -0000

But what alternative? People need little excuse to abdicate any moral obligation at all. What if the choice is piety or apathy? I'll take piety, thanks. And I don't think that the fact that something is impossible means we have no obligation to pursue it. In fact, I think impossible pursuits are some of our most important.

Re: Is Poverty a Violation of Human Rights?

JMW — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 10:34:33 -0000

My two biggest problems with this post and some of the comments are: 1) A blurry idea of what positive and negative rights are. Most things that the state provides in a positive sense would be better termed services, not rights. And most of them come about because the vast majority of people have chipped in to the system, however willingly, and are essentially withdrawing some of that to have these services provided. Having highways built is a lot of things, but it's not a right. Now, even though some who didn't chip in that much take advantage of those highways, some people get really worked up about the idea that someone might get health care even if they didn't chip in as much. I don't know why this is. But even then, we're talking about something that has significant cost -- when someone uses health care, someone is paying for it, somewhere. Likewise, it's hard to see how poverty can be easily alleviated other than redistribution, unless you're working under the assumption that a world is possible in which no one will be poor, an assumption I don't share. Which leads me to: 2) "The only reason there is poverty in the world (true poverty, not American faux poverty) is because thugs with guns keep poor people poor." I wonder how certain Americans, poor Americans, would feel about "faux poverty." This discussion needs parameters. If you're saying, "how do we help people who are poor because of thugs with guns," that's one conversation. But I don't feel like it's the one being had here. Because in that case, there would be no need to talk about positive rights, since the negative right of "not having a thug with a gun keep you poor" clearly supersedes it.

Re: Is Poverty a Violation of Human Rights?

Johnathan Smiley — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 10:32:56 -0000

Positive Rights are simply Orwellian Speak and the most tortured logic for saying that other people have the rights to the fruit of my labor.

In you're essay you avoide some of the simplest, most obvious points. First off, the only way a society can "earn" wealth is by serving others. If I am a breadmaker, I serve society by increasing the supply of bread for all to eat. If I am a car maker, I serve society by increasing the supply of transportation for a society to use. Societies grow by serving others! If you do not add to the overall wealth of a society you will remain in poverty.

Societies that remain in poverty do so, because they bring no value to their fellow man. The reason they bring no value is because they do not have the full protection of their natural rights. If you do not have your own property rights protected, what incentive is their to produce value for others?

"Positive Rights" are simply theft dressed up by the State. No society that steals from its productive members and gives the fruits of labor to the unproductive will survive for long. The productive members of society are wealthy because they serve others and make others lives better!

Ayn Rand has written numerous short essays that deal with your "reframing" of the argument. No matter how much tortuous logic you want to use, Positive Rights are still theft by the state.

Re: Is Poverty a Violation of Human Rights?

JMW — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 10:20:36 -0000

This post and comments thread seems to be well-intentioned, but all over the map. "We have a moral duty to prevent rape" is a perfect example. If you said, "I think most everyone thinks that we have a moral duty to strongly condemn rape" or even "to strongly condemn rape and work to educate the men most prone to it" that would be one thing. That's a moral position. But if I'm failing morally whenever someone is raped, it seems like we're adopting a pretty idealistic (dare I say adolescent?) vision of morality. How could we possibly fulfill that moral duty? We couldn't. A duty that is impossible to fulfill sounds less like a duty and more like a piety to me.