b_b said that slavery is wrong This is clear, concise, and, to my mind at least, axiomatic. We could discuss why self-determination is fundamental, but I haven't seen anyone disagree that it is.Because the most basic human right is the right of self-determination. The essence of being a human is the right to choose.
I would argue not only that it isn't fundamental, but that it is largely illusory. http://cadwaladr.blogspot.com/2010/03/case-against-existence-of-free-will.html
Asking why slavery is wrong presuqes that slavery is wrong, indeed that it is possible for anything to be wrong. Your case against free will is interesting, but it would seeq to take qost of the guts out of the concept of qorality. I feel like I qake choices. Qost of qy choices are easy and qechanical, guided by practiced habits and rules. But when I consider a slightly novel choice, like buying a Rooqba or changing jobs or hunting tardigrades, I do deliberate, and it feels like this takes effort and that I have soqe control over the result. Even if you convince qe that it is all a grand illusion, I will still feel like I aq in control, and I will feel bad if I have no basis for condeqning behavior that appears evil to qe. If we take it as given that slavery is wrong, is there any better reason to explain why it is wrong than soqething along the lines of b_b's stateqent?
Dude, you have something seriously qrong with your keyboard. I, personally, would not use b_b’s definition because I believe that, in an absolute sense, self-determination is illusory and rights are, if not quite nonsense on stilts, then at least not worth any more respect than real people are prepared to grant them. From my perspective, what is fundamental to human beings (or any other animals with moderately advanced nervous systems) isn’t actually freedom but consciousness. Our choices are just the end products of the neuro-chemical machinery in which our decision making processes are instantiated, said machinery being constantly adjusted by our interaction with the rest of the world. You “feel” decisions are yours because your consciousness, being necessary for the assimilation of experiences, is aware of what the machinery is doing. Moral constructs like “rights,” “equality, “ etc, at that level of scrutiny, are just heuristics – rules of thumb (like lines of code) that tell a person how to interpret situations not yet encountered. I don’t assume that the wrongness of slavery is a given – if I did, why would I have entertained the question? I have reasoned, rather, that its wrongness is derivative from one or the other of two more fundamental moral propositions (freedom and equality) and, on some occasions, from a sympathetic association with the suffering of others. Ultimately, it is this latter tendency on which the whole messy, poetic, confused, humane, and sometimes beautiful edifice of moral architecture is grounded. ( --see: “Notes on Morality” http://cadwaladr.blogspot.com/2013/10/notes-on-morality_4.html )
I think it's the good ol' libertarian argument. The best decision a person can make can only be made by that person when they are well informed and not being held at any form of "gunpoint". A slave isn't free to invent, or build, or create. They are only free to do the labor they do not want to do, for someone who doesn't think that labor is important enough to pay people to do it. It leads to a massive waste in time, in labor, and in human beings. Society works best without slavery, it benefits the most without slavery, and it moves forward fastest without slavery. It is because of this, that modern society views slavery as absolutely abhorrent. Lets not also forget the fact that without slavery, without all that crap, we wouldn't have nearly as much racial tension, and society would be overall more equal in happy. It may have been good for the south in the sort term, but our former practice of slavery holds us back even to this day.