I belong to a debate club. We often discuss potential debate topics via email. Here’s an excerpt of a recent email exchange regarding the merits of debating “rights”:
Progressive: Proposed debate phrasing: "All children have a right to high quality and affordable education".
Independent #1: I'm not interested in reducing complicated policy questions to a matter of rights. The devil's always in the details and that's just way too broad. What does that “right” actually look like in practice?
Progressive: One doesn’t preclude the other. Good policy must be guided by a statement of principles and objectives. I think our society is losing track of this core principle, hence the debate suggestion.
Independent #1: As for the "right" to K-9 education: "In 1973, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez that there is no fundamental right to education in the Constitution of the United States. Because of this, the burden for providing a system of public education falls to the states. " (Education Commission, 2016). No prob, since the constitutions of all 50 states enshrine the right to a K-12 education.
There is no conservative movement to take away this right and as AI puts it, conservatives “overwhelmingly support the idea that every child is entitled to access a high-quality education. They generally diverge from liberals on how that education should be delivered, funded, and overseen.” So the debate about K-12 should address how that education should be delivered, funded, and overseen, eg, school choice.
Independent #2: Avoid debates on "rights", except when used as shorthand for some particular policy. The problem with arguments about whether or not people have a "right" to something is that there's an ambiguity between a "right" as what people deserve, according to some higher power like God or Nature, and a "right" as something incorporated into a social contract.
For instance, do the people have a right to vote for who governs them? Well, the signers of the Declaration of Independence had something to say about how the people are given that right by their Creator. In a democratic country, we say that citizens have the right to vote, provided they've reached a certain age and don't fall into certain prescribed categories of exceptions, but what it means to say that that right exists is that it's written into the social contract. However, that sounds too mundane, and people like to attribute the right to their Creator.
There are movements that advocate under banners of "rights", such as "right to life", "right to work", "right to health care", and "right to be left alone", but each one of these is advocating some particular kind of law or government policy, and of course it's fine to debate these as long as they are understood as shorthand for those laws or policies. But it only leads to useless arguments about the definition of "rights" when we debate questions like "Do X category of people have a right to Y?"
Just debate whether or not X people should be allowed to have Y, or whether or not X people should be given Y by the government (as the case may be), and leave abstract arguments about "rights" out of it.
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Note: For the record, I was “Independent #1”. I did take a few liberties with the wording, for the sake of brevity, clarity and good grammar.