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?
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.
Yes, when we talk about human rights we mean as distinct from legal rights. No law can grant or take away a human right, it is inherent to the human condition.
You’ve shown that you understand the distinction but I’ll point out as well that moral right is a third, distinct thing.
Human rights describes the individuals that the rights pertain to, no? So those human rights could either be based in legality or in morality, which wouldn’t always align. People may also have different beliefs about which human rights are morally justified and which ones aren’t. If there’s a third kind of human right that isn’t based on what’s legal or what’s believed to be (or, fundamentally is) moral, then what’s it based in?
Inherent to the human condition is interesting, but isn’t that still a moral stance/belief? Even if you argue that it’s objectively moral (and if you don’t believe in moral subjectivism/moral relativism) or objectively the right thing for humans to have rights based on the kind of beings that they are, how is that separate from morality? As far as I know when someone says “this is a human right” they’re usually asserting that they believe it’s morally correct for humans to have a certain right, and that it would be wrong to violate that right. Occasionally someone says “this is a legally protected human right” to emphasise that it’s a legal right enforced by law. I’m not sure by what metric rights could be ascribed or theorised conceptually to apply to certain individuals, if not law or ethics.
For example, you could say that the law did violate the enslaved’s moral human rights, by assigning other humans a legal right to own them, which many at the time would have also believed was their moral right, even if we don’t agree with that today or assert as being objectively immoral. If their human right to not be enslaved wasn’t legal or moral, I don’t see what the third option could be.
I would also add that it seems that rights are a human concept/social construct, even just in the sense that we’re interpreting what we believe to be ethical/right/moral, even if it’s objectively correct; or we’re enforcing laws based on what people believe is correct, or in some cases what serves certain people personally at the expense of what most people believe is right if the laws are corrupt/undemocratic.
So I think if we’re going to claim that a certain right “just is”, since we’re the ones creating these concepts even if it’s based on our observation of the world and an interpretation that was theoretically objectively correct if not a belief, it falls on us to rationalise and describe how we’re coming to these conclusions and what we’re basing this assertion of a certain right on. Otherwise, “it’s a human right because it’s a human right” is just circular reasoning and has no explanation. How are we formulating our basis for what is a human right? Is it legality? Is it moral beliefs or what we reason (or even logically prove somehow) is objectively morally right? Or … what?
For example, in the case of animal rights theory, many people believe that there are moral rights that animals hold as moral patients, i.e. “negative rights” (= freedom from something being done to an individual) not to be exploited and killed by humans (moral agents), which extend logically from the belief (or fact) of human rights also being morally correct. And in this view, humans by way of our laws, do hold legally the “positive rights” (= freedom of an individual to do something) to exploit and kill animals, but these legal rights are simultaneously violating the moral rights of the animals to not have these things done to them by humans/moral agents.
In this case too, similar to what you said about the human condition, we could argue that something about the condition of animals (which could for example be sentience/consciousness, which they share with humans who are also animals), is the basis for them having these rights, but even then we’re still speculating based on what we believe is either subjectively or objectively moral (since in that case obviously what’s legal is in contradiction with what’s deemed to be moral), and I’m not sure what third definition of rights could be being applied there whether it be in the context of human rights or animal rights.
Your issue isn’t with the whole structure of human rights, it’s with the consensus of established human rights. There are certain species, which enslave other species, that don’t agree with our consensus of human rights.
Legal rights are not human rights. I suggest you go look up the definition of human rights, they’re a separate concept.
A country or state passing a law that makes it legal to punch clowns in the face on Tuesday doesn’t make that action a human right, it just means that country passes fucked up laws.
I’m fairly sure human rights can be used to describe either moral rights or legal rights. In most contexts people are using human rights in a moral sense, but it can be used in a legal sense too. If you’re arguing for a third definition of human rights which isn’t based in morality (what’s good) or legality (what’s been passed as law), then what is it based in?
Human rights are those that apply to all humans. So the right to own slaves can’t be a human right as it doesn’t apply to the owned people. The law created two categories of people, so the rights conferred by that law were not human rights.