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It's about you committing a category error. Nobody would think that saving Crusoe would be bad. However, society-granted rights are about the most basic imaginable, things that a society can always grant no matter how poor it currently is. "Right to life" has never entailed immortality, it merely means that society should not take or needlessly risk your life. If you're alone, there is no society to threaten you (I guess you can kill yourself). If there's two, the "right to life" principle merely states that neither of you should (lightly) take actions that threaten the other's life.
Once you have some fuzzy number n and you need a leader or a group of leaders (called government), it means that those leaders shouldn't take actions against your life, and protect you from deathly threats from the other members of your society (ideally also other societies, but that is not always feasible given size differences, so again not really a right). A society can always protect its members from itself, if someone can take your life with a gun they can necessarily also protect you with the same gun. It's merely about whether they elect to do so. Yes you can confuse this by dividing a society strictly into government and non-government, but this is mostly evidence of a failed society; In a functioning one, the relevant parts of a government can always be extended or reduced (though this process may take some time).
The obvious retort here may be, but what if you have subsistence farmers so busy that they can't even organize the most basic militia to protect themselves from each other? But the answer is equally obvious, namely that if you spend all your time on your farm and can't spare any time outside of it in a militia, you also have no time forming a society in the first place; in which case you're, again, only a society with yourself, the other farmers merely geographically close but not part of the same society, similar to how irl tribes can be quite close without having any (positive) interactions whatsoever.
So in short, it's about how a society ought not being in the way of each other's life, liberty and happiness. Outright helping each other achieve it is of course desirable, and almost all societies try! But the degree to which it is attainable is dependent on many outside factors, so it makes no sense to construe it as a right, and the way progressives try to pretend they're special by doing so is simply presumptuous & arrogant.
And this distinction is still critical nowadays, since in particular healthcare is a black hole capable of eating arbitrary amounts of money. Ironically, the primary difference between America and other western countries isn't that Americans have worse healthcare outcomes (let alone "thousands dying due to unavailable treatment") - in fact, if you compare like-for-like, such as, say, japanese in America vs japanese in Japan (and most other groups), then Americans actually have significantly better healthcare outcomes then most others. It's merely that they spend excessively more compared to modest improvements; But this is simply a function of the fact that healthcare has starkly diminishing returns, the same can be seen for rich vs poor people.
Construing healthcare as a right, on top, has terrible incentives. It means that the moment a new technology to save lifes is developed, it needs to be used on everyone who needs it, costs be damned. In other words, developing new technology becomes negative sum for a society. Modern western countries have somewhat found a way out of this conundrum by labeling all new technologies unsafe and unusable by default (usually even for those who can privately afford it!), and only if you can prove it is safe by running a large-scale study (which incidentally is only really feasible with somewhat cost-effective treatments) it is allowed to be used.
But it's no accident that the overwhelming majority of new treatments is developed in America, since the incentives are much better aligned if you can develop a new treatment, let it be used by everyone who can afford it, it then gets improved (or discarded) depending on performance, and then the masses get access. Ironically, it de-facto also turns the richest into (willing, at least) guinea pigs. But of course, this is then easy to present as some sort of evil rich people conspiracy, keeping the good treatment from the regular people and letting them die. But in the rest of the western world, the people also don't get the good treatment (in fact they get it later or it doesn't even get developed in the first place), it's merely more equal by keeping it from the rich as well. This should be considered an abhorrent outcome - literally everything is worse for everyone - under most reasonable ethical systems. But the superficial optics are better, so it's favored by the easily swayed.
I think we were talking about different things. I was talking about moral rights - natural rights - inalienable rights. You know, the one imbued into Man by his Creator, if there is such a being (but He is, in this context, a convenient philosophical abstraction whether one materially believes in Him or not, provided you are some manner of moral realist). These are famously distinct from legal rights. So when I said that human beings had a right to healthcare, I meant that it is prima facie morally wrong to withhold it from them; that they ought to have it. What moral rights the state turns into legal rights, by pledging to proactively safeguard and guarantee them, is a very different question, and involves plenty of trade-offs and choosing the lesser evil.
I view the Declaration of Independence's "life, liberty and the pursuit of happines"" as acknowledging three of these natural rights and writing them into law as a pledge on the part of the US government to protect these rights as best it can. For all the reasons you outlined, "as best it can" doesn't mean it can actually keep you alive forever, or even really guarantee that you'll only die of old age. Sure. So if you want to argue something like: yes, if the US government had infinite money and we had infinite medicine, it would have a duty to distribute that medicine to everyone, but resources are scarce, and it's just not an effective use of the limited resources to die on the hill of universal healthcare - that's an object-level conversation we can have. I'm not intractable; So - I don't oppose triage in an imperfect world. Actually, triage is probably the hardest and most important job of any government.
What I do want, however, is for everyone to be on the same page with regards to the moral truth that in an ideal society, everyone would have access to healthcare. I would like everyone to agree that this is what we're working towards in the long term, whatever the current state of affairs permits. The right-wing position I was reacting against (by which of course I mean a position that is comparatively common on the right, not universal) is the denial of that moral right to healthcare; the sentiment that healthcare is simply a luxury good. Something you or I can quite naturally desire, perhaps; but not something which adds a black mark in the book of Mankind for every day that goes by where someone is deprived of it.
I notice this is similar to one of the places the race subthread ended up, and I think it's a crux of my biggest meta-issues with the right: where the progressive position is "X is desirable, so we should do X", the right-wing will be a coalition behind the banner of "not-X" that lumps together people who think X is desirable, but impractical at present; and people who think X isn't desirable. I can never shake the sense that despite appearances, the "not-X because we can't" people's natural allies are the "yes-X"ites much moreso than the "not-X because we shouldn't" people. After all, there's only object-level uncertainty separating the "yes-X"s and the "not-X(1)"s, whereas the "not-X(1)" and "not-X(2)" seem to have much more fundamental value differences. Whenever I get into an intelligent conversation with a not-X(1)-ite like yourself, I just mourn that I can't full-throatedly collaborate with their bloc because I suspect it to be full of not-X(2)s.
I believe in a Creator but I do not see how He could have endowned mankind with an inalienable right to healthcare given that we haven’t had any for 99.99999% of our existence.
The same works from the philosophical perspective IMO: if you start from the position that ‘healthcare’ is a marvellous thing that we only invented very recently, then people aren’t being deprived of it but instead they simply don’t have it.
I know you say that you are merely arguing that it would be immoral to deny people ‘healthcare’ in a world where that was practically achievable, but I think that talking about inalienable rights is confusing the issue rather than clarifying it. For example, I think that it would be poor form to actively deny air conditioning to everybody if the alternative is practically achievable but I would find it very odd to say that ‘mankind has an inalianble right to air conditioning’.
In general, you are also confusing the issue a lot by using the term ‘access to healthcare’ as if it were a singular thing with an agreed-upon definition. Are we talking about setting broken bones? Antibiotics for sepsis? Polio vaccines? Talk therapy? Hair loss treatment? In our perfect society, do I have an inalienable right to a team of doctors dedicated to optimising my biochemistry for maximum happiness and performance on a moment to moment basis, and who is going to be made to do that for me? These aren’t rhetorical questions, I think you need to clarify your position, because in my opinion it would be immoral to deny some of these and not others.
I think this line of thinking proves way, way too much. 99.9999% of human history consisted of brutes braining one another with carved rocks. Does this disprove the right to not be murdered? No, it just proves that immorality is rampant/the material world doesn't care about what hairless apes believe to be the moral law. I find this point obvious both from an atheistic (there is no external source of morality outwith ourselves; the world isn't inherently just) and Christian (the terrestrial world is imperfect; the whole point of human life is the struggle to do right by your fellow man despite the odds) perspective.
Again, I regard healthcare as a necessary part of the the practical implementation of the right to life first and foremost, and of other rights in a secondary capacity - after all, it is difficult to describe an unaided paralytic, or indeed an unmedicated madman lost in delusions, as possessing anything that could fairly be called freedom, and either situation makes the pursuit of happiness a tricky proposition. Granted, it is not impossible to be free and happy in your own mind no matter how wretched your circumstance, but at that level of pedantry, it becomes meaningless for the State to pledge to protect these rights, since one starts to wonder what infringing on them could even look like. Hence the forms of healthcare you list are the right of any human being to the extent that they are necessary to preserve that person's life, agency, and capacity for happiness. Not maximize them - preserve them. Broken bones, antibiotics, vaccines: yes. Therapy: it depends. Hair loss treatment: nah. (I mean, you can imagine some mentally ill person for whom, for whatever reason it would make such a difference in quality-of-life that it'd be worth it. But that would have to be vouched for by a psychiatrist and fall under psychiatric treatment.)
Still, if you think "talking about inalienable rights is confusing the issue rather than clarifying it", I don't want to get hung up on a turn of phrase. "I believe giving everyone access to healthcare is the moral duty of the state"? "I believe we should institute universal healthcare if at all possible, because it's the right thing to do"? Put it how you like; I don't really see how this would make you less confused about what I'm advocating.
Oh, but by the way -
…this seems to be refusing to take the premise of the thought experiment at its word. The perfect society is defined as one in which things like medical staff shortage are handwaved away, spherical-cows-style. I don't know if this perfect society has foolproof robot doctors, if it's got money to throw on incentivizing promising students to join the medical profession, if it has really inspiring educational programs that get doctors and nurses to work for a song and the satisfaction of helping their fellow man - whatever. Unless you outright believe it is literally impossible without actual magic to get everyone in the country healthcare, ever, making the thought experiment void, then the specifics of the thought experiment are besides the point.
You make this distinction as if it's obvious, but I'm not sure it is. If an 80 year old is blind, deaf, arthritic, has a gimpy knee, and then breaks his leg, what healthcare is he owed in our perfect society? Are we just going to fix his leg, and tell him, 'Rejoice! We have preserved your miniscule ability to pursue happiness'? Do we fix him back to the physical and mental condition of an athletic 18 year old as a kind of human baseline? Do we immediately fix any negative physical/mental damage as he's growing up, preventing him from becoming old and blind, but ignore the fact that he's genetically stupid and inclined to depressive melancholy?
That's exactly what I'm getting at. Whether your demands require actual magic or not depends strongly on exactly how you're going to define healthcare. If your proposition is 'in an ideal world, we should not refuse to fix people's obvious ailments as long as it doesn't cost us any meaningful amount of money or time to do so' then I'm right there with you, but you seemed to be aiming at a much more far-reaching proposal. I suppose even this limited proposal rules out darwinian 'the weak should perish to strengthen society' philosophies, if that's what you're going for?
I have quarantined this in a separate section because it would derail the conversation:
Quite so. How can we have an inalienable right (an absolute moral guarantee) not to be murdered if it happens all the time? Say that murdering people is immoral all you like, and I will agree with you. But I think lots of things are immoral: do I have an inalienable right not to be cheated on by my wife? To not have my colleagues speak languages I don't understand in the office? Is a black mark placed in the book of Mankind every time these things happen? From where I'm standing, you're using grandiose moral claims about the nature of the universe to back up your personal preference about how much it should cost to go to the doctor. This is exactly why the concept of 'rights' in last half-century has become so fraught: because everyone asserts their personal moral code as if it is an inalienable fact of the universe that never has to be compromised upon (how 'rights' is usually used in conversation and rhetoric).
As far as I'm concerned, the Declaration of Independence was written by revolutionaries high on their own supply: a fairly transparent attempt to claim that not wanting to repay the Crown for the money that was spent protecting them from hostile nations was a grand moral project, as if nobody else had ever thought that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness were pretty nice as long as they didn't get in the way of anything more important. And indeed I note that the US government is quite happy to kill people, imprison them, or otherwise inhibit their pursuit of happiness in order to achieve goals that it thinks are more important.
Addendum: For example, even the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are not obviously without complexity. If you believe, as I do, that what people (those flawed beings) do with their time is not necessarily what will make them happy in the long term, it seems entirely possible to deprive them of some of their liberty to ensure their right to pursue happiness. So I find it hard to see these three things as inalienable gifts I have been given by my creator. I am much more comfortable with the inalienable duty to Do Your Best, Do What I Told You To Do, and Don't Fuck It Up.
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