Obviously it was a good thing that it was banned, but I’m just wondering if it would technically be considered authoritarian.
As in, is any law that restricts people’s freedom to do something (yes, even if it’s done to also free other people from oppression as in that case, since it technically restricts the slave owner’s freedom to own slaves), considered authoritarian, even if at the time that the law is passed, it’s only a small section of people that are still wanting to do those things and forcibly having their legal ability to do them revoked?
Or would it only be considered authoritarian if a large part of society had their ability to do a particular thing taken away from them forcibly?
No. Protecting human rights is not authoritarian.
I agree, but technically it was both protecting human rights and taking away other human rights (to own slaves). Do you see what I mean?
At the time it was a legal right that some humans had, even though it came at the expense of others’ moral right (that most people now believe they had, including myself) to be free. Please tell me you understand this. I don’t think owning others is a human right in a moral sense, even if it was a legal right for some back then. There is a difference between legal rights and moral rights, because legality is not the same as morality. Sorry if that sounds obvious but I think it’s necessary to clarify in order to approach this question with understanding.
That’s a weird assumption when I said it was good that it was abolished. Humans shouldn’t have the right to own slaves is my belief. (But they did have that right at the time legally speaking). Or another way to put it, is that I don’t think humans have the moral right to own slaves, even if they did have the legal right. This was a response to someone else telling me that banning slavery was an authoritarian decision. I just wanted to get clarification and try to understand it better.
When we talk about human rights we usually talk about the “what”, and talking about just the “what” leads to misconceptions like that. So the question is why we have human rights. And the formulation human right treaties take is some form of “Human dignity is inviolable”, which means that all human lives are worth the same, and that value can’t be diminished in any way. Human rights are then listed in order to protect that ideal.
When you consider this, it becomes obvious that owning humans can’t be a form of the right to private property because it relies on some humans being above others.
That’s also the reason why free speech doesn’t include things like slander or ordering someone killed.
I think I see what’s happening here. The missing piece of the puzzle is that there are 2 kinds of rights.
“Negative rights” = the right to not have certain things happen to you, aka freedoms. Eg freedom from being assaulted.
“Positive rights” = the right to do/have stuff.
In the case of enslavement, the negative right - to be free from being forced to work, owned, etc is a much more important right than the positive right to own property.
So you are trying to argue that slavery is a RIGHT? This looks like and argument of guilt by association. Authoritarian is seen as bad, by giving the abolishment of slavery the label of “authoritarian” gives of the idea that you want to associate it with being bad.
If having a law that restricts one’s ability to do something is “authoritarian” then any law is authoritarian, because laws, by definition, determine what behaviour is and isn’t allowed within a society. On that note, morality determines legality, not the other way around.
Slavery means that, if you’re rich enough, you should be allowed to revoke the rights of others. This is refutable at so many levels. If someone were to “willingly” agree to give up their rights, then just you’re just taking advantage of someone who was born in an unfavourable position and have no other choice other than to accept (and maybe not starve) or starve.
I think you are lost in the language. There are no absolute rights, in any legal systems. So any “law” necessarily restricts someone’s “rights”.
Therefore, you need to think about what “authoritarian decision” means, because if all law restricts someone’s rights, all laws are authoritarian by your definition.
Also: terrible example to begin with.
Authoritarianism is all about concentrating power around fewer people. That what authoritarianism IS. Giving more power to the least powerful people is always anti-authoritarian. Yes, there are always trade-offs, no they’re not always as obvious as this one, but more power to more people is never authoritarian.
No, it was anti-authoritarian, as it removed the authority slave holders had over their slaves.
Just as it imposed authority over them to take away their authority, right?
Net authority decreased(by removing the authority imposed on slaves by the slavers), so it’s anti-authoritarian, right?
Authoritarian doesn’t mean exercising authority. Banning slavery did exercise authority, of the law, over slave owners, but it was anti-authoritarian. It took power, and authority, condensed wrongly in the hands of a few and, in theory, distributed it to the many, however effective it actually was.
