The Logical vs. The Moral

There were several questions posed in class on Friday, and I’d like to discuss a few of them.

Are basic needs and basic rights the same? Like what was said in class, from an American political perspective, yes. If we have the right to life, then we have the right to everything that we need to live - like food and water. But when you have to look at it from different perspectives, it gets trickier. It also gets confusing when you realize that people have different definitions of “basic needs.” Is housing a basic need? You can technically survive without shelter, in some places. Is education a basic need, if you need some sort of education in order to get a job to feed your family? And if these are basic needs, do we also have a right to them? I don’t think so. I don’t think that we can classify a basic need as anything other than the minimum we need to survive - if we also want to claim these things as our rights. That’s not to say that I don’t think everyone should have these things. Everyone should have a place to live. However, once you get beyond the bare minimum needed for survival, then what you should and shouldn’t consider basic rights gets complicated. 

The problem with that is, that if you only guarantee people food, you get into all sorts of moral issues. Maybe it's fair, in theory, to not provide a good amount of affordable healthcare and such to the poor, but anyone with a decent conscience or who has been without healthcare when they need it wouldn't be able to agree with a policy that didn't support people like that. And then you get into another question that was brought up in class - how important is an individual to the state as a whole? Does it really matter if a few people end up sacrificed for the good of the state? Do we need to spend our resources protecting people that don't contribute as much back to society? Again, my logic says no. But my conscience says yes. I wish that the two were more compatible. For whatever reason, they don't agree with each other. Based on my logic earlier, I don't think education is a right. Philosophically it doesn't make sense to me. On a practical level though, I really do think that the government should guarantee education up to a point, and give people loans and grants to get higher education. I wouldn't be here if they didn't.