once had a wonderfully
skeptical instructor who would regularly mock his
students by pounding our thick, ancient, seminar table and shouting our
words back to us. He would do this when any line of our argument turned
silly, though we sate there straight-faced and convinced. Silly arguments
always sound more convincing when you pound and shout. Ask any
postmodernist.
We need to hear more of this kind of pounding and shouting in the health care debate, especially in discussions about "health care rights." The whole government health care debate over the past fifty years or so, along with its most recent phase, has always assumed that citizens have some sort of right to health care. When we speak about rights, we most commonly understand a right to be an enforceable moral claim against others . For example, when we say that you have a right to life, we mean that others are morally forbidden to kill you and that you can enforce that moral claim personally (self-defense) or, say, through the civil realm (the police). Similarly, when we say that you have a right to your property, we mean that others are obligated not to steal or damage it.
These two examples, rights to life and property, are commonly called "negative" or non-interference rights, since they specify what others are morally prohibited from doing to you. Political conservatives and libertarians generally defend these sorts of rights in opposition to political liberals and leftists who like a few negative rights (e.g., sexual privacy) but also defend "positive" or welfare rights. A positive right would still be an enforceable moral claim against others, not in the sense of staying out of your way, but in positively supplying you with something. For example, a right to an education means that others are enforceably obligated to supply you with an education. Similarly, a right to welfare or a job or health care means that others can be forced to provide you with these services.
Government programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, and any future program that forcibly transfers income from one person to support another all assume a positive right to health care. They all assume that anyone lacking funds for health services may claim their enforceable moral right to another's income for support. Now, why would anyone believe in such a right?
Just so you don't think I'm making it up, let's examine a specific argument given by a popular advocate of health care rights. In Morality in Medicine, Richard Warner outlines one of the clearest arguments for a right to health care. It deserves longer attention, but we can make a start. Warner believes that we have a positive right to health care because "a right to health care can be regarded as a special case of the right to self-determination." In other words, the right to health care follows from an individual's right to self-determination.
For Warner, the right to self-determination is "the right to pursue those plans and projects we believe will lead to our self-realization." The right to self-determination flows from our right to self-realization. And why do we have a right to self-realization? Two reasons. First, "solely because one is a person;" and second, because "we should maximize happiness in general."
In turn, he justifies these two reasons on the claim that, "We have a strong psychological need to affirm that we should maximize happiness in general" [table pounding in original].
One more question. Why do we have such a need? "Without a nonpersonal reason for living, life begins to seem like an empty and pointless dream." I see.
For many of us, his explanation is refutation enough. Christians should always remember that "the Emperor has no clothes" sorts of questions can be very powerful in undermining the supposedly sophisticated reasons shakily supporting non-Christian claims.
Nonetheless, Warner is a smart man, and he makes some important claims. His arguments extend ultimately from psychological needs to maximizing happiness to self-realization to self-determination to a right to health care. If any one of these links break, then the entire argument fails. Consider the following criticisms.
First, maximizing happiness is very important even in a biblical ethic (cf. Ps. 1; Deut. 28; I Cor. 15:26), since ultimately happiness will be fully maximized when the Lord is completely glorified. Christians can talk of genuinely maximizing happiness because we know the all-knowing and all-controlling God. He has told us what actions produce genuine happiness and which lead to destruction. But how can a non-Christian make such an appeal? Perhaps Warner's finite notion of self-realization leads to great pain after sixty years? Warner can't tell. He has to assume an omniscience that he lacks.
Second, this sort of appeal to self-determination is rather self-defeating. On the one hand, he assumes that self-determination obligates others from interfering in your life (i.e., it's a negative right). But on the other hand, he uses this negative to justify a positive right, health care. In other words, his self-determination requires us to leave people on their own and at the same time to force them to support others' health care needs.
Third, the most condemning link is his appeal to psychological need. He can only make the link from the fact of need to the value of maximizing happiness by assuming the absurd premise that whatever is natural is obligatory. But that kills any ethic.
These sorts of criticism apply equally to secularist conservative arguments for negative rights. Neither non-Christian side in this debate has a worldview that can account for rights of any sort. Both sides are intellectually bankrupt. Just listen to them pound the tables and shout.
