Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Negative rights versus positive rights

Cogitating Duck wrote a blog post recently about negative rights versus positive rights. "Negative rights–government’s promise to do no ill–and positive rights, government’s guarantee to ensure good outcomes.  The sum of human experience and the duration of America’s Constitutional enterprise both attest to this: that it is practical and necessary for government to extend negative rights, but impractical and immoral to extend positive ones." The writer traces this back to Roosevelt's State of the Union speech in 1941, when FDR promoted Four Freedoms:
1. Freedom of speech and expression
2. Freedom of worship
3. Freedom from want
4. Freedom from fear
Read the whole thing here:  http://cogitatingduck.com/2012/07/15/two-trons-four-freedoms/

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