This is ascribing some sort of mythical quality to rights. Rights are simply what a society decides should be conveyed to its people. A country could decide that their people have a right to receiving a free hoodie every November and as long as the country supports that right, those people have that right. There is nothing inherently moral about rights. Countries have many times supported the immoral rights of their people. And people's rights are only as good as the society's support for those rights. There is nothing inherent or inalienable about them.
This is exactly the root of the “atheists can’t be moral” argument. Not that any individual atheist can’t be moral for the time being, but that a godless society inevitably falls into relativism where the only good is the consensus and the only morality is what you can argue.
This is one of those cases. I think we’d all be better off with an absolute basis for rights than a relativistic one.
There is no absolute basis for rights and the good being the consensus happens on religious societies as well. What is good is constantly being argued over and over in all societies.
Believing in an absolute basis for rights ignores the reality that every single right people have was usually fought for during a time when people did not have that right. You can lose rights and you can gain them.
It’s also how you get people arguing that the rights people have in some places (e.g. healthcare, higher education) aren’t legitimate rights even though they most certainly are.
Believing in a relative basis for rights means that slavery is ok as long as the consensus agrees on it. So slavery in the US was completely moral right up until the start of the Civil War and it's moral anywhere in the world it is fine today (as long as it is legal / consensus). I don't think that's moral at all. An absolute basis for rights is above law or human discourse - slavery was appallingly evil exactly because it was an stain against the enslaved peoples' human rights to liberty (regardless of whether the law allowed it or not).
African Americans didn't earn the right to not be enslaved. They always had the innate human right to liberty regardless of what the law said, abolitionists defeated the oppressors that suppressed their innate rights to liberty.
I can see now why we’re talking past one another. I am making a statement about the usage of the word “rights”. When I say “you have a right to due process” it is not a statement about an abstract concept but a matter of fact statement about the legal protections you have, which depends on the jurisdiction in which you are physically located.
You’re talking about the philosophical basis for how we come to our individual beliefs about what rights we should have. Note that the conversation is teetering on the edge of an appeal to the law fallacy: what the law currently says is entirely irrelevant when considering what it should say. To say that slavery is legal is not to say that it is moral, it’s just a question of fact.
In any case, if you have an absolute basis for rights I’d like to hear it. I’m not an expert and I’m curious about people’s theories about these things.
> if you have an absolute basis for rights I’d like to hear it
Societies based on free men do far better than societies based on slaves. Armies of volunteers are much more formidable than armies based on conscripts. Economies based on free markets are much more prosperous than command economies.
I don't know what you'd find compelling, but I see a consistent pattern there. It's almost as if being free confers an inherent advantage. :-/
Anyhow, if you had a job where you are paid to work and could leave any time to get a better job, would you say you'd perform better at the job than if you were forced to work there and whipped if the overseer didn't like your work?
I certainly don't think we are always in accordance with our absolute human rights.
In a relativistic basis for rights, there is not "reviewing what we consider immoral", because morality is just "what every we consider moral". Slavery is moral (at least in 1850s America) because the consensus was that it is ok. Under an absolute basis for rights, it's clear that slavery was wrong then, and wrong now, and will always be wrong (regardless of what the law or consensus says).
I can personally believe slavery is morally wrong but still accept that a different culture may universally consider that there is a right to own other humans as slaves.
And the fact that there's no known good examples of slaves being happy with such an arrangement is a very strong argument in favour of any sort of right to own slaves being a unlikely sort of right that a society would ever successfully and sustainably adopt. I just wouldn't rule it out on principle - if there's anything like a "universal truth" I would accept it's that other societies/cultures need to determine their own rights for themselves, and they can't be imposed.
I'm not sure the union and the confederacy saw themselves as separate cultures though? And either way, I'm not convinced that it was an acceptable use of force (granted, it's not a subject I have any great depth of knowledge in). There are parts of the world today where certain members of society live in conditions not far from slavery, and while I very much hope those societies can in time see the advantages of agreeing on and adopting a more free and equal set of human rights, I don't believe it's justified to use force to impose them just because we're so certain of their "unalienable" nature.
I would imagine not a few slaves would have been killed in the process!
Either way, that on its own doesn't justify the bloodshed that occurred, and arguably the divisions in the US that don't appear to have fully healed yet.
And from what I do know about it, I wouldn't say the US civil war was a good example of an unprovoked party forcibly trying to impose their own "rights" on another society anyway.
One thing I'm willing to agree with you on is that the justifications used by those who believed in slavery were "wrong" - they made assumptions about the biological characteristics of people based on their skin colour or country of origin that weren't justified on any scientific or humane basis. There's really no excusing any sort of belief that people who are clearly capable of the full range of human emotions and thought processes were somehow subhuman and not deserving of free man status. Perhaps there's never been an example of slavery in society that wasn't accompanied by such beliefs, and on that basis I'd accept that all existing examples of slavery that I know of, past or present, are "wrong".
The Janissary elite drawn from the devşirme system of child levy would be the obvious example, particularly toward the end when they controlled many of the state assets and staged palace coups to get the sultan they wanted.
This is inane. I explicitly said that rights are orthogonal to morals. Why are you trying to claim I said the opposite? Do you understand what words mean?
How could rights be orthogonal to morals? Do you have any examples, either real or theoretical, of a right that came to be without an argument based on morality? In fact it's right there in the name. "Rights" refer to things it would be wrong to take away from people, making them right.
