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I don’t know.

If people are “entitled” to shelter, shouldn’t they be entitled to food, even more so? In that case, if a hungry person were to knock on your door and demand something from your pantry, how could they be denied?



The concept of 'positive rights' (i.e. rights that are not just that the state doesn't do something to you, but affirmative rights to something happening) has a long history, and such rights are affirmed by treaties ratified by every member of the United Nations - so the existence of such rights is broadly accepted on an international scale.

Article 25 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Huma...) declares: "Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control".

UDHR is mostly aspirational - it is just a declaration with no enforcement mechanism (although there are a whole series of more binding treaties on specific issues under UDHR). The existence of UDHR does reveal what the international consensus is.

However, it is worth mentioning that positive rights are nominally obligations on the state - i.e. if people's positive rights aren't being met, it is a failure of the state in the same way as if the state infringes on their negative rights. It does not imply that every private individual needs to arbitrarily solve those failures as in your example.

So to answer your original question, according to widely accepted declarations of human rights, people are entitled to live in a society where they have the opportunity to obtain food and shelter (people who are able can be made to work for that food and shelter, but still have a right to food and shelter if they are disabled or unemployed for reasons outside their control).




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