A Reply to 'Who the Health Cares'

Read the original post: https://advocatepressonline.wixsite.com/blog/single-post/2017/04/19/Who-the-Health-Cares

I want to begin by thanking Tom Whitcombe for jumping into the fray and discussing the very important topic of healthcare. But I found the article specious.

The author begins by supplying us with dictionary definitions of healthcare and right(s). I’m not one who is particularly fond of argument by definition. But charitably to the author, he seems to be doing a bit more than that. The two definitions run into conflict with each other because rights entitle an individual to something while healthcare requires something from others: namely, as the author states, “the product of others’ labor.” There’s certainly a very established libertarian worry that anything that obliges one person to the service of another is in contradiction with a classic liberal notion of freedom. It is exactly this conflict that leads us to the authors first two claims.

Claim one is that there is a “basic principle of western civilization” known as “self-ownership.” This autonomy argument is also very fundamental to libertarianism. Autonomy is asserted as a right—a right being something that one has a just claim in—such that under a western societal model everybody has a right to autonomy. However, the author explicitly states in claim two that for everyone to have the right of autonomy, they must adhere to a basic aphorism borrowed from the common law of property: sic utere tuo ut alienum non laedas. This constraint on autonomy is to tell us that one cannot use one’s property of autonomy as a right to injure the property of another’s labor.

What we learn from the author’s article is that rights exist, well, at least one does: autonomy. But this right is conditionalized by what it can’t do to some other person. This is a rational argument, not an empirical one. Thus, we have a priori where x equals the right to autonomy and y equals the necessary limitation on x: If x, then y.

This, according to basic formal logic, presents us with what is known as modus tollens. The idea is to deny the consequent. It’s quite simple actually: the only way the conditional statement ‘if x, then y’ can be false is if y is false and x is true. Modus tollens shows us that if one statement is true, then its contrapositive is also true: e.g., if ‘if x, then, y’ is true, and ‘~y’ (not y) is true, then ~x is also true. Therefore, the author is telling us that healthcare can’t be a right like autonomy is, because the necessary limitation, y, would be false (or in this case violated). The injury that violates, y, I’m inferring, could be that healthcare as a right forces servitude of someone else’s labor for the healthcare right of some other person. But I’m venturing to say that this is a mistaken inference. Perhaps it’s not injurious to healthcare providers as they are still paid for their services rendered. The correct inference, maybe, is that healthcare as a right will afford healthcare services at the expense of more affluent (or even minimally better off) members of society. Maybe this is the injury? That the government, for example, taking peoples’ property (i.e., money) through taxes to redistribute that money to pay for healthcare services for others is the injury to those who have not consented to such redistribution.

Whether it’s inference one or two doesn’t seem to matter as both are problematic. I’ll work off the second inference, as it lines up with the historical precedent of minimalist state libertarianism. First, the very idea appears to appraise justice by that which serves the limitation on autonomy (self-ownership) first, and then autonomy, secondarily. The very idea of naïve liberty unmitigated fails to survive the libertarian argument. Yet, we’re to accept that other constraints can’t also penetrate the shield of unfettered autonomy? Perhaps it’s the inclination to recoil at the very notion that government acting on individuals is acceptable. Though, even the most minimal government in the libertarian conception is constructed from the justification of the people. Yet, the minimalist government still has courts to enforce contracts (that entails an executive branch to carry-out such enforcement). Even the private markets, without the government’s meddling, can deprive the affluent of their monetary property. The private market, in libertarian idealization, might operate by some fictitious invisible hand—though, I must state this capitalist fiction is empirically problematic—but the cost burdened to the affluent could very well exist. Unless the sincere rebuttal is that purely charitable giving by those well-off and the private healthcare providers (including hospitals and clinics, e.g.) would be so sufficient to not need the displacing of costs.

But I don’t even know if I need to go so far as to argue why the article fails hypothetically. As I said before, the article is a rational one that could just as well compete with other more sound and reasonable approaches to procedural or substantive justice. Furthermore, modus tollens most successful venture has been in Popperian falsificationism. Purported to suffice as a means to resolve the problem of induction. The issue presented in Mr. Whitcombe’s article isn’t expressed as an inductive matter. Besides, falsifiability has been largely beset by Bayesian analysis. Additionally, what does denying the consequent tell us truthfully about what is just and justifiable? Phrasing an argument within a valid logical form just tells us something about the argument’s structure ultimately. It doesn’t tell us about the falsehood or bivalence of the conditional. It doesn’t even tell us if the conclusion is actually true. There’s no novel information distilled in the conclusion that wasn’t already in the premises. Elbert Hubbard once wrote that logic can be used as an “instrument used for bolstering a prejudice.” It matters little who Hubbard is. What matters is that the work of logicians and the utilization of logic is a sincere, pedantic game. Logic does not possess the inherent qualities to elucidate all of our objective truths, but can just as easily reveal our motivated inferences.