Water, water, everywhere, but not a drop to drink
Clean water as a fundamental human right: theoretical justifications and consequences
Last week the United Nations declared clean water a “fundamental human right.” This is not a large departure from the rights to food, education, and employment that have already been embraced by the UN, yet such “welfare” rights are still controversial. Critics have argued that access to things such as food and water are not rights, that governments are obligated to prioritize and deliver immediately, but rather important policy goals.
The UN “declares the right to safe and clean drinking water and sanitation as a human right that is essential for the full enjoyment of the right to life.” It is easy to see how a right to life would entail a right to clean water, as well as rights to food and medicine. In fact, some might even argue that rights to employment, education – indeed, all the welfare rights, including the rights to a certain standard of living – stem from the right to life. To many American ears, however, this would be going too far.
To argue against such a right, critics might rely upon a conception of government as essentially mutual security pacts, a view Robert Nozick made famous in his classic Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Nozick argues for a minimalist government that exists to enable free exchange amongst its citizens. Commodities, even essential commodities such as food and water, can only be distributed based on such exchange among consenting parties from a just starting position – the government cannot legitimately interfere with this process.
The stakes for this view are high. There cannot be any “right to life,” as commonly understood, since the government is only responsible for the protection of citizens lives against force (thereby enabling the free trade system) – not against hunger, or thirst, or disease. Even in the face of gross inequalities that stem from several generations of free exchange, the government cannot interfere. Most persons, I suspect, would not be willing to go this far in the other direction.
There are at least two middle ways between these extremes. First, we can make a distinction between a minimalist right to life and a right to the “full enjoyment” of life. A minimalist right to life would encompass only the moral concept of having a life, a largely biological state that certain sentient beings can be in. This right can be embraced while at the same time rejecting that there is any right to the “full enjoyment” of life – a right that comes with employment, education, or standards of living.
The problem with this alternative is that it may seem too minimal still. Even the poorest children in the slums of the third world, barely holding onto life, might pass the threshold – yet we intuitively believe they deserve more.
A second alternative would be to abandon any talk of right to life and instead see these rights as derivative of civil or political rights – rights such as freedom of speech and freedom of political participation. A person who is about to die of starvation or thirst, unable to follow political campaigns or read about the issues, cannot reasonably to said to have the rights of political participation, one might argue. Thus, food and water are human rights because they are addendums to political rights.
The problem with this alternative is that it still may justify too much. How high a standard of living is required before someone can be engaged as a political equal? Compared to someone like Rupert Murdoch, the average person has little freedom of speech. It also seems a bit crass and misguided to give someone food to enable them to vote.
Talk of rights is difficult and complex, in part because they are not first principles of ethics but rather derive from independent theoretical foundations.
-Han
Photo by Flickr user DFID – UK Department for International Development used under a Creative Commons Attribution license
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