Clarity comments on Blue or Green on Regulation? - Less Wrong

54 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 15 March 2007 06:04PM

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Comment author: Clarity 11 February 2016 04:45:25AM *  0 points [-]

I am going to tell a story about me so it would be amazing and awesome if you still kept, reading Thanks. As a 'health care paternalist', or 'former one'. I find it increasingly unconscionable to place heath gains against the self determination of an individual, even if addicted. How am I supposed to believe that health is a high law than liberty? Yes, I can see that willful, selfish cost to the public health system, but that is the problem of the public health system I suppose and I ought to focus on dismantling that instead

Comment author: polymathwannabe 11 February 2016 02:48:40PM 1 point [-]

How am I supposed to believe that health is a high[er] law than liberty?

There is a faction in political theory that argues that, for rights to have any meaning at all, you need first to guarantee the conditions of life that make rights realizable. For example, the right to work is pointless if there are no jobs available.

Says Jeremy Waldron:

if one is really concerned to secure civil or political liberty for a person, that commitment should be accompanied by a further concern about the conditions of the person's life that make it possible for him to enjoy and exercise that liberty. Why on earth would it be worth fighting for this person's liberty (say, his liberty to choose between A and B) if he were left in a situation in which the choice between A and B meant nothing to him, or in which his choosing one rather than the other would have no impact on his life?

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