The NZ government introduced individual transferrable fishing quotas to manage the rights to fish that were common by tradition. Was that a violation of human rights?

Water rights often cause conflict. Say that upstream communities in a river have always had a right to 10,000 cubic metres of water for their farming, but climate change means that river levels are running low and they are taking too much water. Is changing their rights to water a violation of human rights?

Let's say an organisation wants to build a power station to supply a hospital with electricity, thus increasing access to healthcare in the local community. The options boil down to a hydro-run system, affecting water use, or a thermal station removing a main source of drinking water, or no power station (it's not windy enough for wind power). Is making those tough decisions a violation of human rights? In that situation, how do you avoid not violating someone's rights?

How about the world gets serious about climate change, and massively cuts back on coal use, thus throwing coal miners' traditional way of life into disarray in the name of the environment? Is that a violation of human rights?

Is there some special reason to favour a minimum living wage legislation, when many people earning the minimum wage are teenagers or otherwise not dependent on it, and many poor people can't work at all, as opposed to a minimum income subsidy paid to keep people above a poverty level? Is someone who advocates a universal basic income rather than a minimum wage really advocating a policy of violating human rights, or are they just disagreeing about how to do things?

Human rights are great if they can be applied to everyone, but it doesn't strike me that they're great ways to manage problems of resource allocation (property rights have far more advantages).

And if we can't agree on how to implement a right, what's the point of declaring it a right? What's the point in declaring that I, or a government, has a moral obligation to do something if there's no broad social consensus on what that something is, and no remotely objective way to say whether or not someone is actually meeting their moral obligation to provide such a right?

Negative rights do generate hard cases where it's not clear where the obligations lie (eg people who want to exercise their freedom of speech to disrupt funerals), but positive rights seem to me to be all hard cases.

Of course, not all formal obligations are enforced. Use of force often is, but fraud isnt. No-one is arrested for telling his wife that the dress does not make her look fat (when in fact it does), or for having an affair, or for lying about a number of other issues (though adultery can result in a civil case, it is not criminally prosecutable). The only times lying is criminalised is in cases of fraud, or perjury

This of course calls up the standard libertarian force/fraud duet into question. It sems like only some kinds fraud are criminal, the legal fraud is ostensibly private. Which brings us to the conclusion that while the bedroom is private, the board room is not necessarily so. Or if the board room is private, it is private in ways that do not prevent us from regulating it.

I'm relying on the assumption here that no libertarian is going to criminalise adultery or decriminalise fraud. (So any libertarian who will, please sound off and we can have a rousing argument)

There is also the issue that there isnt probably any government which has not tries its hand (and to this day still does) try to enforce duties of virtue. Of course, the fact that no libertarian government exists is not a reason to not pursue libertarian policies.

Of course, that said, there is obviously some class of violations like murder and rape which we have duties to prevent as well as punish. The social contract is one of the ways in which we execute these moral duties. Or in a state of nature, or anarchic society, you are morally required to protect your neighbour from rape, murder, assault or fraud/ or even make retribution on the perpetrators of these wrongs.

The question that is raised in will's post is whether we have a formal moral duty to prevent our neighbour from starving to death (it if it is the case that he does not want to starve to death) The matter of distant people is taken care of at thr instance of state formation. Ubiquitous state formation, in theory, will take care of the problem of protection. If at least everybody is subject to some state or another, everybody's rights are being protected (at least in theory) What to do about states which fail to do the job is tangential to this issue, and not necessarily reliant on whether or not we have a formal duty to support starving neighbours

When I hear people talk about reaching for impossible dreams, I reach for my gun. But I reach for my gun for any damn reason.