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).

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.)