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You can't own human beings, because it violates their fundamental rights. This was true back when slavery was "legal". The Nazis could pass a law saying that th

You can't own human beings, because it violates their fundamental rights. This was true back when slavery was "legal". The Nazis could pass a law saying that the Holocaust was legal, but the rest of the world felt free to disregard that law, and put the Nazis on trial. Some laws are not legal, that is the whole entire point of the West's 2,400 year old liberal tradition. Likewise, some claims of ownership are not legal, and not binding. You can pay good money for a slave, but you still don't own the slave, because no law can make it legal to own another human being. And this was true for all of the thousands of years that slavery was legal: none of those laws were ever legitimate, and none of those ownership claims were ever legitimate.

Swizec 9y ago
> You can't own human beings, because it violates their fundamental rights. This was true back when slavery was "legal". There's no such thing as fundamental rights. Those were won by sweat and blood. Up until the enlightenment and humanist eras there was not even the idea that such a thing as rights even exists. Some inkling of rights existed for royalty in the codes of conduct and such things, but they were freedoms given by right of birth and power of ancestor's sword. For peasants, no such luck. They were property even though they weren't slaves per se.
- ashark 9y ago
  The understanding that rights aren't somehow magical or special, and are just liberties we've decided we like especially well, is surprisingly uncommon, at least among Americans. I blame founder/constitution-veneration and all the just-so fables produced by enlightenment political philosophers (I'm looking at you John Locke).
  - lkrubner 9y ago
    > are just liberties we've decided we like especially well Why do we like them? Why wouldn't we prefer to be slaves? Where do our modern intuitions about rights come from? Whatever the origin of the "like especially well" that you mention, that origin seems fundamental. If you study all the peasant revolts, going back thousands of years, you'll note how naturally people invent the language of rights -- it seems to arise spontaneously during each revolt. And why do people revolt? You can't simply assume that they don't like being raped and enslaved -- you have to explain why they don't like being raped and enslaved. And whatever your explanation is of their feelings, that is the origin of rights.
    - ashark 9y ago
      > And why do people revolt? Relative deprivation? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_deprivation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_deprivation
      - giergirey 9y ago
        Relative deprivation certainly seems a better explanation than requiring some mysterious "fundamental universal rights" that people never knew they had until 18th Century Westerners discovered them. Maybe they're a bit like "souls" for atheists?
        dragonwriter 9y ago
        Well, fundamental human rights were, by the 18th century "discoverers", usually attributed to endowment by a Divine Creator, so maybe not particularly "for atheists". But, yeah, they are certainly non-physical non-demonstrable entities that are presumed to exist based on faith alone.
- lkrubner 9y ago
  Until the Arabs came up with the concept of zero, no human had any idea about zero, nor did mathematicians use the zero. Nevertheless, zero has always existed. Just because humans didn't know about it doesn't mean zero didn't matter. Likewise, all human beings have always had fundamental rights, and that was true during the era when people did not spend much time talking about rights. You assume this when you write "Those were won by sweat and blood." The point is, why did people fight for them? Why did people think they had any right to fight for them? More so, you are wrong that the discussion of rights has only happened in the modern era. Elaine Pagels, a historian of early Christianity, has studied why women and slaves were often the strongest supporters of early Christianity -- part of the answer is the Christian church fought for their rights. Pagels offers, as an example, a priest in North Africa who felt that slave owners should be punished if they raped their slaves. At the time, the idea was counter to Roman law, but of course the millions of slaves in the Empire were supportive of such ideas.
  - danbruc 9y ago
    Nevertheless, zero has always existed. The mathematical anti-realist would disagree. Likewise, all human beings have always had fundamental rights [...] Where do they come from? How did we discover them?
    - lkrubner 9y ago
      I responded in another comment.
  - deong 9y ago
    People fought and bled and died for the right to own slaves too. The point is that there's no such thing as a universal right. There are only rights some individual believes should be universal rights. If enough individuals band together, they can get those rights enshrined by whatever authority has the ability to grant and recognize rights for those people, but as long as that authority refuses them, they don't have that right. They just should have that right, according to you or me or whoever.
    - 9y ago
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  There are such things, and they are won by sweat and blood. You're alleging that rights have no conceptual existence and equating them with power distributions in society. Just because the concept of rights was inchoately articulated prior to the enlightenment does not mean they did not exist, just as the notions of virtue and democracy originated in ancient Greece, notwithstanding the narrowness of the concept back then, it being inclusive of slavery and so on.
- clock_tower 9y ago
  The Middle Ages most certainly had rights and liberties, but they were given or withheld based on the kind of person you were: a slave had almost no rights, a serf only a few (serfs and slaves both existed in this period); a nobleman, especially a peer of the realm, had almost all the rights; and everyone in the middle had an unpredictable grab-bag of them. A commoner couldn't sue a knight; a knight couldn't invest in a business; only Jews could loan money, but they couldn't use the proceeds to buy land. Two people could commit the same crime under the same circumstances and get completely different punishments, because one of them was a citizen of the city where the crime occurred and the other wasn't. The Enlightenment's key innovation was to give everyone the same rights -- rejecting some rights (like immunity from lawsuit) as intrinsically unjust, and granting the rest to everyone.
  - Swizec 9y ago
    You are correct. There was a concept of rights, but not a concept of universal rights, which is how we understand "rights" today. I stand corrected.
    - clock_tower 9y ago
      I wish you hadn't been downvoted; I upvoted you, for what it's worth. Thanks for your response!
danbruc 9y ago
While I agree with the result of your statement the justification seems quite weak. You can't own human beings, because it violates their fundamental rights. Where do those fundamental rights come from? I also wanted to attack a couple more of your statements but I have no formal education in philosophy or law and I would probably mess up the [subtle] differences between moral, legal, lawful, and so on. But I am nonetheless pretty sure that many of your points are at least not entirely true or need additional backing by certain philosophy frameworks.
deong 9y ago
> You can't own human beings, because it violates their fundamental rights. This was true back when slavery was "legal". It really wasn't. We would like it to have been, but at the risk of stating the obvious, it's not an inalienable, fundamental right if someone can take it from you without fear of repercussion. Slavery was legal -- the scare quotes add nothing. The difference between legal and "legal" here is just personal ethics. Now, we can of course decide to proceed today as though the laws were never legitimate, and offer reparations, for example. Or in the case of the Nazis, as you mention, to try them for crimes committed in the past. It's worth noting though that the Nuremberg trials were very controversial for exactly that reason -- many people sympathetic with the desire to punish the Nazis were extremely uncomfortable with the idea of trying people for violating international laws that didn't exist at the time of the offenses (or only existed in treaties the Germans never signed). We did it anyway because, well, they deserved it, but it's far from the truth to say that it was a routine application of some tradition in which there are some laws that are so fundamental they need not be stated anywhere. And as a matter of constitutional law, we strictly prohibit doing that in our own legal systems.
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  Yes, it is an inalienable fundamental right. Your argument is that if it's possible to violate a right, then it doesn't exist, but that's nonsense. People violate others' rights all the time. The concept of a right is not a thing that is self-actuating, but that you can feel morally free to retaliate if your rights are violated. Rights are what you assert for yourself. You can, of course, assert that you have dominion over others, but you'll have to persuade those others to agree with your if you hope to exercise that, which is unlikely but not impossible - churches are full of people who want to be relieved of the burden of freedom qua moral decision-making, and are thus fertile recruiting grounds. Of course you may also assert rights but find them denied by law for one reason or another. In which case you can choose to give up your rights or fight for them at risk to your person. Laws are merely the product of political process, which may or may not be corrupt. If you feel a law is unjust, you're off to a good start because ultimately law is merely the servant of justice, and if you wish to rebel against an unjust law or practice you'll often find many supporters. Rights have a significant moral dimension as well as a legal one, so just because someone denies the existence of your rights doesn't mean you have to obey them. You can defy or subvert their authority, and if your intentions are pure then you should. By pure I mean not being a hypocrite; the broadening of your individual rights is not predicated on the shrinkage of someone else's.

Swizec 9y ago

> You can't own human beings, because it violates their fundamental rights. This was true back when slavery was "legal". There's no such thing as fundamental rights. Those were won by sweat and blood. Up until the enlightenment and humanist eras there was not even the idea that such a thing as rights even exists. Some inkling of rights existed for royalty in the codes of conduct and such things, but they were freedoms given by right of birth and power of ancestor's sword. For peasants, no such luck. They were property even though they weren't slaves per se.

ashark 9y ago
The understanding that rights aren't somehow magical or special, and are just liberties we've decided we like especially well, is surprisingly uncommon, at least among Americans. I blame founder/constitution-veneration and all the just-so fables produced by enlightenment political philosophers (I'm looking at you John Locke).
- lkrubner 9y ago
  > are just liberties we've decided we like especially well Why do we like them? Why wouldn't we prefer to be slaves? Where do our modern intuitions about rights come from? Whatever the origin of the "like especially well" that you mention, that origin seems fundamental. If you study all the peasant revolts, going back thousands of years, you'll note how naturally people invent the language of rights -- it seems to arise spontaneously during each revolt. And why do people revolt? You can't simply assume that they don't like being raped and enslaved -- you have to explain why they don't like being raped and enslaved. And whatever your explanation is of their feelings, that is the origin of rights.
  - ashark 9y ago
    > And why do people revolt? Relative deprivation? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_deprivation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_deprivation
    - giergirey 9y ago
      Relative deprivation certainly seems a better explanation than requiring some mysterious "fundamental universal rights" that people never knew they had until 18th Century Westerners discovered them. Maybe they're a bit like "souls" for atheists?
      - dragonwriter 9y ago
        Well, fundamental human rights were, by the 18th century "discoverers", usually attributed to endowment by a Divine Creator, so maybe not particularly "for atheists". But, yeah, they are certainly non-physical non-demonstrable entities that are presumed to exist based on faith alone.
lkrubner 9y ago
Until the Arabs came up with the concept of zero, no human had any idea about zero, nor did mathematicians use the zero. Nevertheless, zero has always existed. Just because humans didn't know about it doesn't mean zero didn't matter. Likewise, all human beings have always had fundamental rights, and that was true during the era when people did not spend much time talking about rights. You assume this when you write "Those were won by sweat and blood." The point is, why did people fight for them? Why did people think they had any right to fight for them? More so, you are wrong that the discussion of rights has only happened in the modern era. Elaine Pagels, a historian of early Christianity, has studied why women and slaves were often the strongest supporters of early Christianity -- part of the answer is the Christian church fought for their rights. Pagels offers, as an example, a priest in North Africa who felt that slave owners should be punished if they raped their slaves. At the time, the idea was counter to Roman law, but of course the millions of slaves in the Empire were supportive of such ideas.
- danbruc 9y ago
  Nevertheless, zero has always existed. The mathematical anti-realist would disagree. Likewise, all human beings have always had fundamental rights [...] Where do they come from? How did we discover them?
  - lkrubner 9y ago
    I responded in another comment.
- deong 9y ago
  People fought and bled and died for the right to own slaves too. The point is that there's no such thing as a universal right. There are only rights some individual believes should be universal rights. If enough individuals band together, they can get those rights enshrined by whatever authority has the ability to grant and recognize rights for those people, but as long as that authority refuses them, they don't have that right. They just should have that right, according to you or me or whoever.
  - 9y ago
anigbrowl 9y ago
There are such things, and they are won by sweat and blood. You're alleging that rights have no conceptual existence and equating them with power distributions in society. Just because the concept of rights was inchoately articulated prior to the enlightenment does not mean they did not exist, just as the notions of virtue and democracy originated in ancient Greece, notwithstanding the narrowness of the concept back then, it being inclusive of slavery and so on.
clock_tower 9y ago
The Middle Ages most certainly had rights and liberties, but they were given or withheld based on the kind of person you were: a slave had almost no rights, a serf only a few (serfs and slaves both existed in this period); a nobleman, especially a peer of the realm, had almost all the rights; and everyone in the middle had an unpredictable grab-bag of them. A commoner couldn't sue a knight; a knight couldn't invest in a business; only Jews could loan money, but they couldn't use the proceeds to buy land. Two people could commit the same crime under the same circumstances and get completely different punishments, because one of them was a citizen of the city where the crime occurred and the other wasn't. The Enlightenment's key innovation was to give everyone the same rights -- rejecting some rights (like immunity from lawsuit) as intrinsically unjust, and granting the rest to everyone.
- Swizec 9y ago
  You are correct. There was a concept of rights, but not a concept of universal rights, which is how we understand "rights" today. I stand corrected.
  - clock_tower 9y ago
    I wish you hadn't been downvoted; I upvoted you, for what it's worth. Thanks for your response!

danbruc 9y ago

While I agree with the result of your statement the justification seems quite weak. You can't own human beings, because it violates their fundamental rights. Where do those fundamental rights come from? I also wanted to attack a couple more of your statements but I have no formal education in philosophy or law and I would probably mess up the [subtle] differences between moral, legal, lawful, and so on. But I am nonetheless pretty sure that many of your points are at least not entirely true or need additional backing by certain philosophy frameworks.

deong 9y ago

> You can't own human beings, because it violates their fundamental rights. This was true back when slavery was "legal". It really wasn't. We would like it to have been, but at the risk of stating the obvious, it's not an inalienable, fundamental right if someone can take it from you without fear of repercussion. Slavery was legal -- the scare quotes add nothing. The difference between legal and "legal" here is just personal ethics. Now, we can of course decide to proceed today as though the laws were never legitimate, and offer reparations, for example. Or in the case of the Nazis, as you mention, to try them for crimes committed in the past. It's worth noting though that the Nuremberg trials were very controversial for exactly that reason -- many people sympathetic with the desire to punish the Nazis were extremely uncomfortable with the idea of trying people for violating international laws that didn't exist at the time of the offenses (or only existed in treaties the Germans never signed). We did it anyway because, well, they deserved it, but it's far from the truth to say that it was a routine application of some tradition in which there are some laws that are so fundamental they need not be stated anywhere. And as a matter of constitutional law, we strictly prohibit doing that in our own legal systems.

anigbrowl 9y ago
Yes, it is an inalienable fundamental right. Your argument is that if it's possible to violate a right, then it doesn't exist, but that's nonsense. People violate others' rights all the time. The concept of a right is not a thing that is self-actuating, but that you can feel morally free to retaliate if your rights are violated. Rights are what you assert for yourself. You can, of course, assert that you have dominion over others, but you'll have to persuade those others to agree with your if you hope to exercise that, which is unlikely but not impossible - churches are full of people who want to be relieved of the burden of freedom qua moral decision-making, and are thus fertile recruiting grounds. Of course you may also assert rights but find them denied by law for one reason or another. In which case you can choose to give up your rights or fight for them at risk to your person. Laws are merely the product of political process, which may or may not be corrupt. If you feel a law is unjust, you're off to a good start because ultimately law is merely the servant of justice, and if you wish to rebel against an unjust law or practice you'll often find many supporters. Rights have a significant moral dimension as well as a legal one, so just because someone denies the existence of your rights doesn't mean you have to obey them. You can defy or subvert their authority, and if your intentions are pure then you should. By pure I mean not being a hypocrite; the broadening of your individual rights is not predicated on the shrinkage of someone else's.