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I agree with you, but it's not a tautology. It's saying that free individuals (slave-owners) should have freedom to do stuff they want, e.g. own slaves, without
by lordgrenville 7y ago
I agree with you, but it's not a tautology. It's saying that free individuals (slave-owners) should have freedom to do stuff they want, e.g. own slaves, without having a government stop them from doing it.
- TheOtherHobbes 7y agoThat's the basis of the model - "I do what I want, and you also do what I want." Obviously, it fails as a universal. Freedom that operates on the basis of economic, political, or physical coercion of others isn't freedom at all. Which would be fine in a more mature system, because the basic question in any political organisation is where to place the trade-off between individual freedom and personal responsibility to others. The US model is all for individual freedom, but has real issues with the concept of personal responsibility to others - which it fails to solve by pretending the problem has never existed, and is irrelevant.
- lordgrenville 7y agoOne way out of this is by narrowing your definition of morally relevant others - which historically has excluded women, or slaves, or people of other races (and currently excludes non-human animals, but that's a broader debate...)