[warrenwilkinson]

My criteria is when someone mentions a right, can I meaningfully append the question 'At whose expense'? If I can, it's bogus.

These are rights: Right to liberty, to own property, to your life, to the pursuit of happiness, to freedom of speech.

These are not: Right to a job, to a 'fair' wage, to an education, to internet access, to clean water, to a pig every month.

Real rights prevent someone from doing awful things to you, basically "No one will harm you, or interfere with you doing this" (where this might be living, owning property, speaking, etc). The bogus rights are basically promises of free stuff.

[nooneelse]

Wait, just being able to ask the question? There isn't even a dependance on the answer?

Wow.

Then your two sets aren't even correct. None of the things you mention are rights. You can append the question to all of the things you put in the "These are rights" pile, even if you would then think the answer is "nobody".

Heck, sometimes the answer will even be someone besides the "right holder". Person A's hypothetical "right to liberty" can clearly come at the expense of person B, when person B is using person A as trained but unpaid labor.

I think this simple criterion is rather flawed.

[jerf]

"Wait, just being able to ask the question? There isn't even a dependance on the answer?"

You appear to have skipped over the word "meaningfully" in warrenwilkinson's post, or perhaps he edited it in, but either way, it addresses your concern.

(To your later point I'd observe that rights are generally considered symmetrical; in a society where you have "the right to liberty" your example falls through because A's right is being violated for your example, and your argument seems to fundamentally require asymmetry for it to make any sense.)

[nooneelse]

You are shifting all the work that the criterion was meant to do into the term "meaningfully". Without elaboration on the application of that term, this is of no help as I used a very common standard of "meaningful", "having meaning". A question has meaning, even when the answer is obvious or the answer to a "who" question is "no one". Example: "Who has been to Mars?" is a clearly meaningful sentence.

The issue at play later is: does person A have a right to liberty. Warrenwilkinson's criterion for it not being a right was the ability to append "At whose expense?". I even made that a more reasonable criterion, by implying the further requirement that, in order for a hypothetical right to be considered not a right, it had to come at the expense of someone else (the elaboration used by many other people in better statements of similar criteria, and seemingly the underlying consideration really at play in the two lists warrenwilkinson gave). The objection to even this elaboration was that in the case of a society with slavery, the hypothetical "right to liberty" would obviously come at the expense of slaver owners.

You introduce the interesting symmetry constraint, as charitably as I can gather, intending to use the symmetry between the slaves and owners. No help really, as the owners might as easily conclude that they don't have a right to liberty, they simply have liberty itself. If you landed on an island with slavery on-going, does the criteria proposed have any teeth?

There is, I think, a sharper edged point than this merely amusing slavery objection, but I've mentioned it in other threads already.

[pbourke]

> These are rights: Right to liberty, to own property, to your life, to the pursuit of happiness, to freedom of speech. > These are not: Right to a job, to a 'fair' wage, to an education, to internet access, to clean water, to a pig every month.

This categorization is true within American society. Other societies express different rights.

[_delirium]

I'm not sure it's even true with respect to American society, or at least consistently true. A meritocratic-free-market mindset that supports providing education as an equal starting point is fairly common. A slogan sometimes used is "equal opportunities, not equal outcomes". It's used in various contexts, but in one context, the argument is that kids have the right to expect an education that starts them out on a level playing field, but not the right to any particular salary when they grow up. So this view would support free schools, but not support redistributive income taxes.

The negative way of phrasing that same sentiment would be: "if you don't get ahead, you have no one to blame but yourself, because you could've paid more attention in school or gone and read up in the library". It's easier to make that argument if there are in fact free schools and libraries, so that we can claim that everyone had that opportunity, and therefore if they didn't use it, it was their fault.