1y ago

Was banning human slavery an authoritarian decision?

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?

79 comments

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?
  
  Owning others is NOT a human right. It is a violation thereof.
  
  all I hear is you think humans have a right to own slaves
  
  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.
  
  At what point was owning slaves a human right? It could be a legal right, yes. But I am eager to see which fucked up, inbred, mouth breathing country thought making owning a slave a human right would be a good idea.
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.
- I was about the comment a similar thing.
  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.
questions like this nicely demonstrate how worthless a concept "authoritarianism" really is
- Not really. It is the tolerance paradox.
  Banning slavery might be authoritarian but it is less authoritarian than allowing it. So on the political scale, banning slavery is anti-authoritarian and allowing it is authoritarian.
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.
As in, is any law that restricts people’s freedom to do something
The problem of this approach is that in that case you refuse any law. Even anarchist would agree that a stateless society need people to agree on common rules.
Speed limit ? restrict your freedom to do something, private property ? Restrict your freedom to go where you want, does restricting your freedom to commit murder feels authoritarian ?
Now what's more authoritarian ? having the state protecing your right to have slave ? Or having the state protecting people freedom by not letting someone enslave them.
It is literally removing authority.
- Removing a kind of authority of the people over other people, but wouldn't it be imposing an authority from the government upon the remaining slave owners?
  
  No.
Insofar as authoritarian is a useful metric (not very), Yes and it was good
Yes. There's nothing more authoritarian than a revolution. Slavers, colonizers, capitalists, landlords, and other such parasites can only be dealt with effectively using extreme violence and state oppression.
Natural language is inherently imprecise. You're going to have to add a contextual definition if you want this to have a single answer.
If making someone do something is always authoritarian, abolition is authoritarian to slavers and anti-authoritarian to slaves. If implementing a law with no checks and balances is authoritarian, it was authoritarian when Louis XIV did it, but maybe not in other cases. If a policy that upholds any kind of hierarchy is authoritarian, it's always anti-authoritarian.
- I would go further to say that if "making someone do something" is the definition, literally any action taken by any government is authoritarian. If a government did not make people do things, it would functionally cease to be.
  
  Yep. That's the definition Marxists have gravitated to historically, and by that definition everyone is authoritarian and we should stop worrying about it. There's quotes I'm sure someone here would be happy to supply.
Yes it's autharitarian to ban slavery. Kind like a revolution is autharitarian. Don't really get the people who don't want to impose , what ya gonna do? Ask nicely?
Yes, and it was good authority to exercise.
This sounds like a semantic argument, so... definitions.
Authoritarian - 1) of, relating to, or favoring blind submission to authority
Slavery is blind submission. Forbidding authoritarianism isn't authoritarian. Kinda like how destruction of the self (suicide) cannot be selfish, despite what some will argue.
I think it is a bit unfair to give you shit for your question.
it is normal to confuse authoritarian system with restrictions of freedom. Because generally that is how it works. But not in this case...
Because it is the paradox of tolerance all over again. Technically it is authoritarian to ban slavery but it would be more authoritarian to allow it as people would own people... So on the scale of how authoritarian an action is, banning slavery is as anti-authoritarian as it gets and allowing slavery is as authoritarian as it gets. (Of course, a world without slavery and without any rules would be less authoritarian but... I think we know better than trying that with slavery)
I hope this helps in actually understanding the reason instead of being told what it is.
- It’s not at all unfair when instead of thanking people for their answers, they’re rewording what they have said to ask in a different way just to try to act like their hypothesis is right.
  Playing Devil’s Advocate is one thing, taking the time to try to effectively say that people should think Lincoln was authoritarian because he removed a legal “right” is another.
  The STAMP act was legal, and our ancestors rebellled and got a country out of it (among other things). Law does not make right. And that’s what the OP doesn’t understand. He’s using semantics to try to make up something that simply isn’t true.
  Edit: And technically Lincoln didn’t change the law, the 13th Amendment did. Lincoln simply created a proclamation that slaves in most areas (note that it wasn’t all slaves everywhere in the states, deals were struck to omit some areas from the proclamation) are to be considered free because it was a way to help win the Civil War. It was both morally right, and a strategic move. If that is to be considered authoritarian, then every single executive order that presidents make should also be considered authoritarian. But again, it’s simply not true in our system of government (however plagued by dysfunction it is these days).
This sounds like another version of the “definition of freedom”.
Is freedom being unrestricted from doing whatever you want? Or is it protection from people doing whatever they want that would otherwise injure you?
I guess I’d argue that banning slavery in the middle of a culture that embraces it is, in fact, authoritarian. Similarly, enabling slavery in the middle of a culture that rejects it is also authoritarian.
It gets more interesting when the population is split on what they want policy to be. I think Prohibition is a better comparison since it’s less emotionally charged.
Was enacting Prohibition authoritarian? Sure seems that way, even though it had a lot of support. Was rolling it back also authoritarian? The people who originally supported it and now see it taken away probably feel it’s authoritarian.
IMO as long as people are happy to argue with each other about basic definition of words, the answer to the original question is “it doesn’t matter”.
Your rights end at the point where they infringe on someone else's rights.
Like, it's my right to walk where I want but it's not my right to walk into your house. Because it's your right to own private property.
Secondly, authoritarianism is not about how many people the law affects. It's about style of governance.
- "One's rights end where another's begin" - Morally speaking I agree with this, and I've heard this phrase used by animal rights activists to argue that humans shouldn't have the right to violate animals' (moral) rights to be free, to not be killed, harmed, exploited etc. at least by humans who are moral agents & don't need to do so.
  Again, there is a difference between moral and legal rights. Just like in the case of human slavery where some humans technically had the legal right to enslave other humans - and I would agree that those laws were unethical to begin with since the moral rights of those slave owners to do things ("positive" rights) ended where the moral rights of the victims to be free from oppression/harm/etc ("negative" rights) began - many people argue that the current legal rights of humans to, basically, enslave & kill non-human animals, are similarly built on unethical laws, and don't translate to moral rights, in the sense that humans' rights also end where other animals' rights begin, morally speaking (such a position would of course entail action to liberate non-human animals via boycotting of animal exploitation (veganism) as a moral obligation, similarly to how when the laws that enabled people to own slaves were in place, boycotting the slave trade and being an abolitionist would also be considered a moral obligation by most people today).
"Have these gentlemen ever SEEN a" yadda yadda
No. A nation that allows slavery doesn't practice human rights. For human rights to exist they have to apply to everyone, which can't work if some people are considered property.
No amount of gotchas, or arguing semantics is going to make slavery okay, and the way you're replying to peoples answers makes me think you fundamentally don't understand the question.
Authoritarian is a very small portion of people made decision and control the majority, where in democracy the decision is made based on the majority.
Is the decision to end slavery a majority decision? Then it's democratic.
- WTF, no. Democracies can be authoritarian. If they abridge rights or compel individuals to action, that's authoritarianism. Doesn't matter it 51 people out of a hundred think they can boss the the other 49 because they voted on it.
  
  That sounds just like what the losing side will say tbh. Brexit is bad, but it's a bad choice made by the majority, in that it's still a democratic process voted by the masses. Democracy is a system, it's the will of the people, not a moral alignment. It's democracy as long as the people affected by the result is there to vote.
  Democracy can be authoritarian but then it will be called authoritarian, not democracy.
- Representative Democracies are, by definition, authoritarian. A small number of people are elected, democratically, to make the decisions for the majority.
  Is the decision to end slavery a majority decision? Then it's democratic.
  With the contradiction being that the people who were pro slavery could just decide, "Nah, we're not going to end slavery", and continue to do slavery. Which I'm pretty sure is generally how that went in the USA.
  
  If democracy is authoritarian, then what is the lack of democracy called?
- Thanks, I think this answers my question. Even if it was a majority decision, it seems intuitively like the government (and the majority of people) imposed some kind of authority over the remaining slave owners (who were in the minority), but I understand that generally such a decision wouldn't be considered generally "authoritarian" just because it used that authority, unless it was imposed upon the majority of people.
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/william-gillis-your-freedom-is-my-freedom
Enforcing an equal opportunity environment is only authoritarian if your definition of authoritarian is anything that challenges antinomianism.
Significantly less authoritarian than slavery.
Yes i.e. the paradox of tolerance
Yes.
But slavery was also authoritarian.
Any situation where there is a power imbalance that can be enforced through physical or psychological means that somebody doesn't agree with is authoritarian. Employer/employee? Authoritarian. Parent/infant? Authoritarian. Bank/bank customer? Authoritarian. Doctor/patient? Authoritarian.
Probably the only reasonable definition of authoritarian would be something like, "To be ruled/governed by an authority." I've decided that Bill over there gets to be in charge of things, they're the authority. I don't always agree with the decisions they make but they're in charge. Which seems like it would overlap a bit with the idea of democratic centralism.
There’s no such thing as consensual slavery, so I’m gonna go with no. You have to draw the line somewhere, and drawing the line at forcing other people to do things seems like a good place to draw the line.
This is kind of the base paradox of chaos and faith. If God is the universe and everything, and God is "right", then that makes good and evil equal. It's a paradox people don't think of when it comes to sovereignty and freedom. Both those things mean you would need to fight for survival, in turn one could not be "free" by modern governing terms. You get your "freedom" but that means you aren't going to have the military killing for you or your subsidized help. True freedom is not utopia. True freedom is a life of war and survival.
I think you should pause to interrogate the statement “freedom to own slaves.” What do you think ownership is? Who enforces it?
If passing a law that takes away ownership is “authoritarian” in your eyes, what about the enforcement of ownership? Doesn’t the state enforcing property rights also take away certain freedoms? Not just with the obvious example of slavery, but in general.
Maybe. I guess authoritarianism is good sometimes.

79 comments