A view that hardly anyone embraces

It is not an airtight view, but it is also not the least plausible view.  Imagine a “basic needs” argument that suggests, a’ la David Braybrooke, that individuals truly have positive rights to a certain degree of sustenance, health care, shelter, and so on.  Yet above that basic needs level, individuals don’t have positive rights to much of anything at all.  They are left to fend for themselves, though of course they will benefit from social cooperation.  After all, positive rights have to stop somewhere if only because of the scarcity constraint.  Furthermore, perhaps what society owes a person is “enough to construct a meaningful life,” but not so much more.

You may or may not agree, but as a view it is not crazy.

To make this more specific, imagine a health care policy that stated individuals have a true right to access any health care technology invented up through say…2004 or so.  Individuals would be guaranteed “2004 value health care lives.”  (In 2004 that certainly seemed pretty good.)  But for subsequent health care developments, a free market will reign.  Is not guaranteeing basic needs an essential part of the egalitarian argument?  Surely not everything needs to be equalized?  Anyway, no one believes in guaranteeing individuals protection against all the rare diseases out there, as that would cost too much.  So a line will be drawn somewhere.

The very title of this post suggested these views are extremely unpopular.  One reason might be their theoretical inadequacy.  But surely another reason is that, at the margin, they suggest you just don’t have too much complaining you can do.  You don’t have too much to say about social arrangements.  You don’t have too many opportunities to express purely negative emotions about how things are.

And perhaps that is a big part of what people find intolerable.

What does that tell you about political views more generally?