5 - What's wrong with slavery?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 January 2010
Summary
Slavery seems to us horrible: it is contrary to nature, it violates the feelings that God and Nature have implanted in our breasts, and so on. It used not to seem horrible or contrary to nature, even to many people who talked loudly about the inalienable right of liberty.
D. G. Ritchie, Natural Rights[S]laves are human beings who are not counted as sources of claims, not even claims based on social duties or obligations, for slaves are not counted as capable of having duties or obligations. Laws that prohibit the abuse and maltreatment of slaves are not founded on claims made by slaves on their own behalf, but on claims originating either from slaveholders, or from the general interest of society (which does not include the interests of slaves). Slaves are, so to speak, socially dead; they are not publicly recognised as persons at all.
John Rawls, “Justice as Fairness: Political Not Metaphysical”W. D. Ross describes T. H. Green's thesis that moral rights depend on social recognition for their existence, and not just for their effectiveness, as plainly wrong. He poses a purported reductio ad absurdum: “[It] would imply that slaves, for instance, acquired the moral right to be free only at the moment when a majority of mankind, or of some particular community, formed the opinion that they ought to be free.” He concludes that this is absurd and cannot be consistently maintained.
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- Information
- Rights, Race, and Recognition , pp. 142 - 169Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009