Re:Housing is a human right: How Finland is eradicating home...
by mytailorisrich on Friday January 31, 2020 @09:42AM
(#22202001)
As mentioned, the key here is that "right to..." classically means (in both Europe and US) that one cannot prevented or banned.
This is more fundamental because it indeed used to be that whole parts of society were banned from doing things or owning things.
We now take this fundamental right for granted, which might explain the shift to interpreting "right" as "being entitled to".
There is another aspect in your comment, which to conflate "not being to obtain" with "discrimination". I think this is going a step too far.
* People should have a right to housing.
* Yet we see many people how apparently can't obtain housing.
* Assuming they don't just all prefer to live on the streets, some forces are hindering them to get housing.
* It is therefore the responsibiliy of society to remove this discrimination, so that people don't just have the right on paper, but also factually.
So this isn't about entitlement in the negative sense.
The constitutionalist view more common in the US:
* People should have a right to housing (I know, not per the consitution, but this is the right this article is about)
* If nobody is discriminated by law, based on race, gender or something else, from practicing this right (e.g. buying property, or signing a contract for renting a flat), then all is fine.
So the core difference is that the consequentialist view looks at empirical evidence to decide whether there is discrimination or not. The institutional view just looks at the law etc. ( = the institutions).