Discuss Issues and Controversies about Rights
Please submit your ideas to use about these issues and controversies in the discussion about rights. From short comments to feature-length articles, we welcome your ideas.
Here are topics on which we are inviting comment:
The right to medical care
If there is a natural right to life, is there not a right to medical care, since medical care extends life? The desire to support life certainly has animated much charitable work in many cultures and ages. Religious orders have been built around such charitable health care work. Does this speak to a right?
What “right” to healthcare do political activists and governments profess in their efforts to consolidate and control healthcare delivery and the livelihoods of those involved in delivering the care, even to the extreme of a single-payer?
Is there a right to seek medical care? If so, what are the boundaries?
Who gets to define what is “medicine”, what is “care”, what is “quackery”, and what is “malpractice”? And what, if anything, should be done about each?
Do “traditional medicine” practices of indigenous peoples, associated in the West with “shamanism”, qualify?
What about the objection heard from Hippocratic physicians that “medicine”, properly understood, is rapidly disappearing, due to third-party payers, and that true medicine has been replaced in the West by “health care”, which is budget-driven, ideology-driven, and a means of state- and corporate-control of subject populations, in which “care” has become a poor substitute for “medicine”?
Maybe declaring a right to healthcare is not so problematic, if no obligation to provide care is implied. There certainly is a right to seek medical care, but it is harder to justify a right to force unwilling healthcare providers to render care or to take money from some people, against their wills, to pay for the care of others. What if the medical knowledge deployed was only acquired by ruthlessly harming innocents, experimenting on them without their consent?
The right to food
Write a post or article for RightsBlog.org about, or defending a position on, rights to food.
The right to shelter and climate control
Write a post or article for RightsBlog.org about, or defending a position on, rights to shelter and/or climate control.
The obligation to military service
Write a post or article for RightsBlog.org about, or defending a position on, the obligation of people to serve in the military and the right of one’s neighbors to compel service.
The right to gender self-determination
Write a post or article for RightsBlog.org about, or defending a position on, rights to self-identify one’s gender and/or to modify one’s body in gender-specific ways.
The right to transportation
Write a post or article for RightsBlog.org about, or defending a position on, rights to transportation.
The right to public streets and rights of way
Write a post or article about, or defending a position on, rights to public streets and rights of way.
The right to marry
Write a post or article for RightsBlog.org about, or defending a position on, rights to marry.
The right to practice or abstain from religion
Write a post or article for RightsBlog.org about, or defending a position on, rights to practice religion or to abstain from its practice.
The right to repair
Write a post or article for RightsBlog.org about, or defending a position on, rights to repair items, machines, and devices, that the seller of the item may want to prohibit, either in order to force buyers to return the item to a manufacturer-approved repair facility.
Important examples that have had legal challenges are: farm machinery, automobiles, cell phones, computers, health monitoring devices, and myriad modular components designed to be replaced in their entirety for a “proper repair”, with any disassembly of the module being forbidden.
