William Schulz on Expanding the Meaning of Rights
In the second presidential debate, the candidates were asked whether health care was “a privilege, a right, or a responsibility.” Senator McCain said it was a responsibility—of government and business. You said that it “should be a right for every American” and cited as “fundamentally wrong” your mother’s experience of being denied payment for her treatments as she lay dying of cancer.
In pronouncing health care a right, you took an enormous step in the direction of re-framing one of the most contested domestic issues in a way that has profound implications for a wide variety of other issues. Whether you intended to or not!
Americans typically think of rights in terms of the traditional civil and political variety: freedom of speech, press, religion; racial equality; due process—those rights guaranteed in the United States Constitution. But much of the rest of the world has a more robust understanding of rights, encompassing such economic and social rights as the right to education, to work, and, indeed, to health care.
Perhaps because of our historical emphasis upon individual responsibility and certainly because of the taint associated with anything that could even vaguely be called “socialism,” Americans have been suspicious of labeling the realization of social or economic welfare a “right.”
There is reason, however, to think that is changing—and not just because McCain/Palin’s invocation of “socialism” failed so miserably to ignite panic in the electorate. A fascinating new study by The Opportunity Agenda of policymakers in California and Illinois reveals that a significant majority is willing to label education a right and many of them are willing to do the same with health care. (Interestingly enough, policymakers lag the general public, 82 percent of whom say access to quality education is a right and 72 percent of whom say access to health care is one.)
Why is this important? First, because if education and health care are rights—if, in other words, they are not something to be earned but something that automatically goes along with being human—then not only can they not be taken away but the government has an obligation to figure out how to protect and fulfill them. All the debate, for example, about whether illegal immigrants and their children should be denied access to schools or to anything beyond emergency health care melts into air. It is not that nations can’t regulate their borders, nor is it that people don’t have to pay for the fulfillment of rights in the form of taxes. Guaranteeing rights doesn’t relieve individuals of responsibility for their own welfare—the right to health care does not mean that people can abuse their health willy-nilly and expect everyone else to cover the consequences. But recognition of social and economic rights does mean that we are under obligation as a society to fashion ways for everyone to have their basic needs fulfilled. This is the ultimate recognition of what it means to opt for the common good.
And the second reason why recognition of education and health care as rights (rather than as just voluntary instruments of a successful society) is so important is because that recognition opens up the conversation about what other aspects of human welfare may be claimed as rights. Here is where you may be more reticent to wander.
Those policymakers who were relatively sanguine about the rights to education and health care went all weak in the knees when it came to issues of economic security, like the right to a fair wage sufficient to meet basic needs or to be free of poverty. Many believe that recognition of such rights will lead to inveterate freeloading. Others say that there is no practical way to realize them. And yet the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations in 1948 with the United States in the lead, could not be clearer: “Everyone has a right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care,” reads Article 25. That right can be achieved gradually and it in no way implies that governments must engage in massive handouts or adopt a particular economic system. But it does mean that we must begin to grapple in a new way with what we owe one another and whether we are serious in calling ourselves one nation and one people.
Who could be better placed than you are to facilitate such a conversation? Rights, after all, derive from our common human misery in the face of political oppression or a want of abundance or a degraded environment, and they give voice to the best of the human spirit—that which inspires us to make sure that our fellow human beings have access to the fundamentals of what they need to survive and thrive.
You have championed that spirit, whether you have used talk of “rights” to do so or not. And, indeed, groundbreaking as it would be to hear you expand your commitment to social and economic rights from health care to economic security and thereby introduce America to a new understanding of rights, how you articulate that movement is less important than how you achieve it. Rights are complicated and controversial, and you may be cautious about employing the lexicon. That would be unfortunate. But the fact that you (and, with your help, we) can envision a society in which poverty is everybody’s problem to eradicate—that is what is truly important and that is what will help make you not just a great president but a transformative one.
William F. Schulz, a senior fellow in human rights policy at the Center for American Progress, served for twelve years as executive director of Amnesty International USA.
