A quick response to Michael

Michael's invitation is a tempting one:  I love San Diego, running along the beach with Michael sounds fun, and -- of course -- I am always eager to have things "explained" to me.  

Like Michael, I am a fan of the work of our friend Nicholas Wolterstorff (I reviewed his recent book, "Justice", here) and, like Michael, I am perfectly happy to agree with Nick that the idea of "rights" (not just "the right") has an important role in our thinking about justice.  "The modern language of rights," John Finnis wrote, "provides . . . a supple and potentially precise instrument or sorting out and expressing the demands of justice."  If it were in fact the case that, generally speaking, "an argument in support of a human-rights-claim against government just *is* an argument in support of a claimed 'moral obligation [of a certain sort] of a political community to its members'", then, I suppose, my reservations about rights-talk in this context would (conveniently) dissipate, or at least lessen.  But, it does not seem to me that, generally speaking, this is the case.  Rights talk is complicated; people employ it in different ways, meaning different things.  It is, Finnis observed, "often . . . , though not inevitably or irremediably, a hindrance to clear thought when the question is:  What are the demands of justice?"

The health-care debate is about the distribution of scare resources, about trade-offs, about second-bests, etc.  My reservations about rights-talk in this context are not theoretical, they are, I think, more practical.  It distorts the debate, it seems to me, to suggest, or imagine, that what is going on in the current debate is that some people are invoking a right against the government; what they are doing, instead, is asking the government to raise money, in a variety of ways and from a variety of people, and allocate it in a different way, a way that (proponents claim) will better secure for many people access to health care.  I have a human right to religious freedom -- because I am a human person, no government ought to coerce me to practice a faith I do not profess.  The better way to think about the current health-care debate, though, is to say that "given all the givens -- e.g., because we are a prosperous nation -- our government ought to modify its policies in the following ways, and thereby better secure access to basic health care for many who currently lack it."  I worry that "rights talk", in this context, can be used to obscure the necessarily pragmatic balancing -- the trade-offs, etc. -- that goes on in the crafting of policy.