I’m assuming that you’re a liberal in need of basic education, so here’s my first lesson: the questions you asked have very little to do with “basic human rights” and are no doubt meant to persuade people that everyone’s entitled to free therapy for their stress.
Here’s a better framing of the fundamental question: What am I, as a total stranger, obliged to give you because you’re alive and in my presence, whether you’re the most interesting man in the world or an illegal alien who just shot a woman on the pier in San Francisco?
What I can’t live without has nothing to do with basic human rights. What someone I don’t know shouldn’t live without likewise is much broader than what that person is entitled to because of having a pulse.
Everyone needs water or they’ll die. You can’t live without water. However, that doesn’t mean you’re entitled to my water. If I’m walking down the street and you come and tell me that I’ve got to give you a sip of my bottle of water, I’m going to point you to the nearest toilet and tell you to drink out of that, dogs do it all the time.
Basic human rights are God-given rights. The right to live (conception to natural death) and defend that life and those you care for. The right to your opinion and to express that opinion. The right to liberty, to do as you chose as long as it does not hurt another. The right to believe as you wish without retribution or coercion.
Sensible list. Some very subjective terms, such as pure and clean and some emotional terms, worry and forced.
I’ve always contended that most sane and honorable people will agree on most self-governing policies all through the political spectrum i.e. right to life, clean up after yourself and freedom of association. The disagreement is frequently on how to achieve those goals.
1.) Do all you have agreed to do.
2.) Do not encroach on other persons or their property.
A typical liberal “human right” that has little meaning. I’m sorry, but if you’re a wino living underneath the freeway in LA, at rush hour your clean air is in serious jeopardy and I don’t care. Go live in Bakersfield. Then you’ll just need to worry about dust storms fouling up your clean air.
Then again where do morals come from? Monkeys do not have morals, they couldn’t have evolved. Whose moral standard do we use? Yours? Mine? Adolph Hilter’s? Jeffery Epstein’s?
It has a good deal of meaning if you live in city during an atmospheric inversion.
It also means that I don’t want to breathe the smoke from your cigarette nor do I want the pollutants from your coal fired electricity plant drifting into the air I breathe.
I believe that although rights are not natural, might can make imagined rights a reality. However, the enforcement of the rights is really what matters because government can claim to protect your rights while ignoring them at the same time.
A list of basic human requirements for survival and some modicum of “pursuit of happiness” would be good. The problem arises as the list expands from needs to wants. In response to those Watchman listed:
No, you don’t get it. You’re conflating “likes” or “don’t wants” with human rights. I don’t want smoke from the Sonoma fire drifting over into my area, but it burns, and the wind blows, and I’m SOL for awhile.
