Shue, Henry. "Liberty". In Basic Rights: Subsistence, Affluence, and US Foreign Policy, by Henry Shue, 65-87. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1996.

Shue, Henry. "Liberty". In Basic Rights: Subsistence, Affluence, and US Foreign Policy, by Henry Shue, 65-87. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1996.

• Dictators and NATO strategists have generally made an assumption that development can only occur in conditions of limited liberty. Meaning that for poor countries to secure a right to subsistence, they must give up their right to many civil and political liberties (65-66).
• Liberty, defined as civil and political rights, are certainly good and enjoyable, but not all of them are basic rights, defined as those rights necessary for all other rights. Only a small number of liberties are basic rights: freedom of movement, and freedom of democratic participation (67-71).
• The right to participation must allow people to have an active role in determining the social policies that govern their lives and the nature of these institutions. This participation must be effective to determining future decisions, and participation cannot result in threats to one's security or subsistence (71-72).
• Some would object that this cannot be a basic right because many societies have existed where people did not necessarily want to express their rights to political participation. This means that it cannot be a basic right (72).
• This is clearly a bad argument, since perception of what constitutes a right or a duty does not make something a right or a duty; it does not change morality. There remains a right to subsistence whether or not someone recognizes it, so the same would be true for participation (72-73).
• Damn, Henry Shue got so deep in his liberal foxhole that he made me remember that morality and ethics are totally relative and only exist in the perceptions of men. Unless you are religious, there is no absolute moral truth and nothing is inherently moral or immoral, meaning that people thinking something is a right is quite literally the only thing which makes it a right. Damn I fucking forgot how dumb non-religious philosophy can be.
• Many contemporary dictatorships, and other historical examples, provide citizens with guarantees of security and subsistence without allowing the right to participation. Since so many people enjoy these basic rights and others without participation, it demonstrates that participation is not a basic right (74).
• The author argues that rights are only meaningful when societal institutions exist which can prevent their violation and provide redress in cases of violation. This means that societal institutions must be set up to protect these rights and redress their violation, something which the other claims cannot exist in dictatorship (75).
• "It is not possible to enjoy full rights to security or to subsistence without also having rights to participate effectively in the control of security and subsistence. [...] Without channels through which the demand can be made known to those who ought to be guaranteeing its fulfillment, when in fact it is being ignored, one cannot exercise the right" (75).
• Life under a benevolent dictatorship provides guarantees to security and subsistence, but not the right to security or the right to subsistence. If the dictatorship decides to suspend these rights, then people do not have the ability to effectively demand these rights, meaning they do not exist in practice (76).
• Okay, so this is my main problem with Henry Shue's fucking argument, assuming that no democracy means government can just do whatever the fuck it wants. Yes, the dictatorship could just suspend rights, but that requires the government acting in total unity, something which almost never happens. By the same logic, only an armed populace provides true rights because any democratic government, if it had total unity, could do the exact same thing or suspend all right, including participation. For individuals the pointless of this distinction is more extreme, since a democracy can strip you of all rights just like a dictatorship.
• The author also argues that dictatorships are more likely to engage in the deprivation of basic rights, and are also likely to be corrupt and unresponsive to the needs of the population. Really just argues that dictatorships will be corrupt and not enforce rights [and democracies won't be corrupt??] (76-77). Also, no longer even making absolute logical statements, he is just going on bland assumptions about politics.
• Freedom of movement constitutes the right to be have one's limbs restricted by artificial means or to have internal movement denied. There a number of objections to this constituting a basic right (78-79).
• The main issue is that the confinement and restriction of movement of prisoners or the criminally insane is a recognized and generally accepted institution. There are not obvious reasons why criminals should not be imprisoned after fair trials or why maniacs should not be straight-jacketed (79).
• The complexity of the issues involved in freedom of movement raises more questions about contemporary policies. For example, conscription would appear to violate this right. Additionally, the 'internal borders' distinction is arbitrary, raising issues of rights to emigration or immigration (79).
• The author argues that, despite these difficult questions, freedom of movement does constitute a basic right because if one is unfree to move than the provision of subsistence and security is dependent on the whims of others controlling your location, meaning that they are conditional goods, not rights (80-81). 
• The author proposes a counter-argument in which a dictatorship has developed semi-independent, but still undemocratic, bodies in the judiciary or elsewhere which prevent the government from arbitrarily denying rights. The author does not answer this challenge, but dismisses it as impossible due to the evilness and corruption of all dictatorships always; institutions will not protect rights if they are not accountable through participatory democracy (83-85, 87).