"We" as evolved social animals have pretty universally come to the agreement that humans should have a few basic necessities, such as food, water, shelter, (and less agreed but equally important) personal safety.
I could ask if you continuing to live is your human right.
I'm not sure there's any absolute decree that everyone can agree on that says you deserve to live. However, we evolved people tend to assume that every human deserves to continue living (at least until our differences become too great, at which time we sometimes just kill each other).
Therefore, your demand for proof that having shelter is a human right is bunk.
OK, and here I was thinking that human rights were premised on a philosophical basis. Thank you for clarifying that they are merely a political matter.
Just because he said it in this way doesn't mean you can't think for yourself and realize that it also has a philosophical basis. You are a human. You are capable of your own independent thoughts and conclusions which are as valid as other people's. If you can yourself find ethical reasons to give humans a place to live by default, and I'm sure you can, (because suffering = bad, no home = suffering, true for every human) you just created a philosophical reason for why it might be valid to consider it a human right.
Among those the UN counts as members are the Taliban (by way of Afghanistan) and Putin’s Russia, which makes it arguable that the UN as a body is in a deciding position on fundamental human rights, let alone a coherent position.
How does one 'prove' that other than by appealing to a list of 'human rights', upon which you and the other commenter surely disagree? There is no fundamental philosophical principle beneath human rights in which it will rigorously generate a list of rights. It's a null question, and I suspect you know that.
The stellman of 'housing is a human right' is 'everyone should have adequate shelter', and that's a far more productive starting point. The 'right' angle adds nothing.
I agree! That's why I take issue with calling X or Y human rights. It misleads the average person person into thinking that there is actually is such a thing as a human right, rather than the term just meaning "thing we really like".
With that being said, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that assertions about human rights by organizations such as the UN be internally consistent. The UN claims that human rights are universal. Human rights such as to food, shelter, medicine, etc. fail this universality. To provide them requires taking resources from others and reallocating them. Therefore, they are conditional upon the ability of a society to reallocate these resources. Therefore, they cannot be human rights, and assertions to the contrary should be identified as being politically motivated.
I don't think universality is a prerequisite for validity
For that matter I guess I would disagree with the UN. Someone who forfeits their basic human rights, for example, would not be entitled to them. So in that sense they're not universal.
That logic doesn't follow. There are plenty of things that, in some cases, lack of them causes death; but are not human rights. There are people that cannot survive without a liver transplant; not everyone gets a liver transplant; some people die because they cannot get a liver transplant. A live transplant is not a basic human right.
There are many things that, as a society, we should do our best to make sure everyone has access to; housing, food, medical care, etc. The more people that have access to them, the better off we, as a society, are. Whether or not those things are a "basic human right" is debatable; but they fact that you need them to survive doesn't define them as such.
This is a normative fallacy. If people die because they didn't get healthcare, that doesn't mean they didn't deserve healthcare. I'd argue that everyone who needs a liver (which is not the same as a liver transplant) has the right to one.
> but they fact that you need them to survive doesn't define them as such
Isn't that basically saying that surviving needn't be in a definition of 'human right'?
> Isn't that basically saying that surviving needn't be in a definition of 'human right'?
Yes, because "surviving" isn't a human right. It's something we, as a society, should do our best to make sure everyone is able to do, but that's not the same as saying it's a human right. If it was, then "not having a heart attack" would be a human right, which is clearly ridiculous.
Not so clear to me. If some company flooded a river with heart attack inducing chemicals, would you say that's fine because not having heart attacks isn't a human right?
I'll put it to you like this. If you believe there is a human right, then someone can't pursue it if they're dead. So if, in order to pursue that right, they need to pursue being alive, the pursuit of being alive falls within that right, no?
Prove it.