“Quick, what is your position on life vs. death? For life and against death, right? So you would never ever allow anyone to take any action that would lead to a higher chance of death, right? Like say driving on the freeway instead of staying in bed? What, you
Six years later, I'm pretty sure that my understanding was entirely wrong.
I now think that the argument is this:
As a citizen, you owe some things to the State just in virtue of being a citizen. Call these "some things" your citizen-debt.
In particular (the argument assumes) contributing to the common defense is part of your citizen-debt, because the State as such cannot exist unless the citizens protect "the rights and honor of the nation".
Furthermore, the phrase "involuntary servitude" in the 13th amendment must refer only to labor above and beyond whatever labor is already owed as part of your citizen-debt. Otherwise, the Constitution would deny the State something that it needs to survive, namely the labor that its citizens owe it. Since the Constitution cannot survive without the State, it would follow that the Constitution is denying itself something that it itself needs to survive. That the Constitution would be so self-negating is the contention that the justices call "refuted by its mere statement."
In short, since the draft is just calling in a debt that you owe as a citizen, the draft falls outside of what "involuntary servitude" must be read to mean in the 13th amendment.
Now, insofar as being a citizen is voluntary, you voluntarily owe everything in your citizen-debt. In that case, citizen-debt labor could be voluntary automatically. It may be that the justices would endorse this argument.
But I suspect that the justices would go further. They might deny that the concept of "voluntary" used in the 13th amendment is even relevant to citizen-debt labor In that case, the question of whether being a citizen is voluntary wouldn't enter into the argument.
This old posting, "Are you pro-slavery," is stupidly tendentious. Robin abjures looking to definitions, and then he gleans one from wikipedia while omitting the key to the definition in the first sentence of that article: "Slavery is a legal or economic system under which people are treated as property."
If Robin is prepared to defend an institution that reduces humans to chattels, he should do so, rather than resorting to obscurantist games with an Orwellian twist.
The 13th amendment allows involuntary servitude under very limited circumstances (and scotus cheated with conscription). But there is no question that slavery—property in human beings—has been abolished.
What kind of special pleading sometimes drives Robin to such utter rubbish?
@ Tyrrell_McAllister That would be the argument I, personally, would use in favor of the draft (that is, a draft in which all voters are equally likely to be picked; historically drafts often had exceptions for those who also had the most political power), based on Rawlsian logic- the majority of the country accepted the given risk of being drafted as the cost of the war.
However, the wording of the amendment in legal terms clearly doesn't allow for that. So for anyone who voted *against* the draft to be drafted would still count as involuntary servitude.
I would say: If the taxpayers aren't willing to pay market wages that will attract enough soldiers to fight the war, then the war isn't important enough to them for them to enslave soldiers for it.
This is true for the US, which could afford to pay high enough wages that it wouldn't have to draft soldiers. I might consider a draft "permissible" for a country that couldn't afford to pay its soldiers.
There is solid evidence that the secessionist leadership would have rejected any offer of compensated emancipation.
Lincoln proposed a general plan of compensated emancipation in the Union states in March 1862, months before the Emancipation Proclamation (even the preliminary version). None of the Union slaveholding states (Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, and Missouri) accepted the plan, and they later got no compensation at all—a possibility Lincoln warned some Marylanders about in July 1862:
The incidents of the war can not be avoided. If the war continue long, as it must, if the object be not sooner attained, the institution [slavery] in your states will be extinguished by mere friction and abrasion--by the mere incidents of the war. It will be gone, and you will have nothing valuable in lieu of it. Much of it’s [sic] value is gone already. How much better for you, and for your people, to take the step which, at once, shortens the war, and secures substantial compensation for that which is sure to be wholly lost in any other event.
The compensated emancipation plan was enacted in the District of Columbia, where Congress could enact it without the approval of local slaveholders.
I was implying the issue should probably be looked at more closely, thats all. I am far from an expert on the subject, but the numbers are intriguing.
As I understand it the CSA seceded largely because they felt the federal government was going to try to put an end to slavery. They were right, but what would they have done if they were offered money? I would think anyone trained in economics should consider this option.
Well, all that Robin has done in order to create a potential for his argument is to adopt an unusually wide definition of slavery - note that the Wikipedia entry he links to is "List of slaves", not "Slavery", which does indeed say "a form of forced labor in which people are considered to be the property of others".
I'm not at all interested in the rights of the slaveowner. You were talking about a specific case when the strict enforcement of a valid rule (against slavery) would have led to harm. I was proposing a fudge which, if the slaver knew about it, might have caused him not to make the deal, but I'm not proposing that we inform him of this.
You were proposing that the valid rule (against slavery) be ignored in order to ameliorate a specific case. I was proposing that other valid rules (against deceiving buyers, and against expropriating property owners without compensation) be ignored at a later date in order to liberate the slaves. Enforcing the original illicit transaction as law transforms what was done from a short-term solution of an immediate problem to the permanent institution of slavery enforced by the law of the land. Purists would refuse the compromise I suggested, but your whole game is to discredit purists. So I got down in the gutter with you and gave an answer as cynical as your own.
My real objection was your tendentiously using a single case to discredit a valid law. These kinds of messy act/rule problems come up all the time, and people deal with them in various ways, of which I think yours is the worst.
If we hold the contract to be non-binding then why would anyone buy the slave in the first place? If slavery will help the starving girl it must be because the owner expects the contract to be upheld. Citing other examples where bad things follow from slavery just seems to emphasize my point that it depends. Like life vs death or almost anything else, we don't want to be always in favor or always against, we want our opinion to depend on important details.
In natural states, having some slavery is better than having violent disorder — even for the slaves. That’s why they rarely revolted.
They rarely revolted because of violent order and the absence of refuges, not the fear of violent disorder. Defiance was violently and sometimes lethally punished.
I guess I'll bow out, but I'm astonished at the depths to which contrarianism has sunk. Apparently nowadays you're irrational and uncool if you continue to uphold the conventional anti-slavery position. People are falling all over themselves to prove that they're not PC. Jesus.
Historically, prohibition of the possibility of selling oneself or selling one's children into slavery was constitutive of liberalism and the possibility of a free society. (Locke and Rousseau both wrote about it). It isn't something that people think about much any more because it's been a dead issue for centuries, but at the turning from serfdom to freedom, that was one of the majot issues. I'm amazed to see Hanson so blithe about it,
Setting up stacked hypotheticals in order to refute e general principle by showing that it might do harm in a single case is a cheap debater's trick. "But what if this Haitian girl will starve if not sold into slavery? What if there's no other option? What then, Mr. pious anti-slavery man?" There's never no other option. And the compromise anti-slavery immediate answer in this case might be to allow the sale to take place, but hold it to be non-binding, so that as soon as the slave saw a chance to escape they would have a right to do so. Would Hanson have the Haitian state enforce the slave-owner's rights to his slave?
Cases like the Haitian girl's are fairly common in SE Asia, and "because otherwise she's starve" is the best-case rationalization. Some parents sell their children into slavery to buy TVs. This is really horrible: why did Hanson automatically accept and relay the parents' self-justification? There is a literature on contemporary slaving and the best-case Hanson cites is not typical. But he wants to get the camel's nose into the tent and score contrarian points against moralizers and idealists.
Likewise, renting convicts out to work off their crimes is recent American history, especially in the South (up until the 30s IIRC). It led to a lot of frameup convictions, and the persons enslaved were mostly black. (Recently in Luzerne County PA they had frameup convictions of about 100 kids by corrupt judges paid off by for-pay prisons, so it still could happen today).
In sum, Hanson seems historically ignorant and more a smirky contrarian market-worshipper than a libertarian of any kind. People like Hanson give rationality a bad name.
What about contracts that specify not only that a person may be enslaved (under certain circumstances), but also designate their children (and their children's children, etc.) as slaves?
Six years later, I'm pretty sure that my understanding was entirely wrong.
I now think that the argument is this:
As a citizen, you owe some things to the State just in virtue of being a citizen. Call these "some things" your citizen-debt.
In particular (the argument assumes) contributing to the common defense is part of your citizen-debt, because the State as such cannot exist unless the citizens protect "the rights and honor of the nation".
Furthermore, the phrase "involuntary servitude" in the 13th amendment must refer only to labor above and beyond whatever labor is already owed as part of your citizen-debt. Otherwise, the Constitution would deny the State something that it needs to survive, namely the labor that its citizens owe it. Since the Constitution cannot survive without the State, it would follow that the Constitution is denying itself something that it itself needs to survive. That the Constitution would be so self-negating is the contention that the justices call "refuted by its mere statement."
In short, since the draft is just calling in a debt that you owe as a citizen, the draft falls outside of what "involuntary servitude" must be read to mean in the 13th amendment.
Now, insofar as being a citizen is voluntary, you voluntarily owe everything in your citizen-debt. In that case, citizen-debt labor could be voluntary automatically. It may be that the justices would endorse this argument.
But I suspect that the justices would go further. They might deny that the concept of "voluntary" used in the 13th amendment is even relevant to citizen-debt labor In that case, the question of whether being a citizen is voluntary wouldn't enter into the argument.
This old posting, "Are you pro-slavery," is stupidly tendentious. Robin abjures looking to definitions, and then he gleans one from wikipedia while omitting the key to the definition in the first sentence of that article: "Slavery is a legal or economic system under which people are treated as property."
If Robin is prepared to defend an institution that reduces humans to chattels, he should do so, rather than resorting to obscurantist games with an Orwellian twist.
The 13th amendment allows involuntary servitude under very limited circumstances (and scotus cheated with conscription). But there is no question that slavery—property in human beings—has been abolished.
What kind of special pleading sometimes drives Robin to such utter rubbish?
@ Tyrrell_McAllister That would be the argument I, personally, would use in favor of the draft (that is, a draft in which all voters are equally likely to be picked; historically drafts often had exceptions for those who also had the most political power), based on Rawlsian logic- the majority of the country accepted the given risk of being drafted as the cost of the war.
However, the wording of the amendment in legal terms clearly doesn't allow for that. So for anyone who voted *against* the draft to be drafted would still count as involuntary servitude.
I would say: If the taxpayers aren't willing to pay market wages that will attract enough soldiers to fight the war, then the war isn't important enough to them for them to enslave soldiers for it.
This is true for the US, which could afford to pay high enough wages that it wouldn't have to draft soldiers. I might consider a draft "permissible" for a country that couldn't afford to pay its soldiers.
There is solid evidence that the secessionist leadership would have rejected any offer of compensated emancipation.
Lincoln proposed a general plan of compensated emancipation in the Union states in March 1862, months before the Emancipation Proclamation (even the preliminary version). None of the Union slaveholding states (Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, and Missouri) accepted the plan, and they later got no compensation at all—a possibility Lincoln warned some Marylanders about in July 1862:
The incidents of the war can not be avoided. If the war continue long, as it must, if the object be not sooner attained, the institution [slavery] in your states will be extinguished by mere friction and abrasion--by the mere incidents of the war. It will be gone, and you will have nothing valuable in lieu of it. Much of it’s [sic] value is gone already. How much better for you, and for your people, to take the step which, at once, shortens the war, and secures substantial compensation for that which is sure to be wholly lost in any other event.
The compensated emancipation plan was enacted in the District of Columbia, where Congress could enact it without the approval of local slaveholders.
I was implying the issue should probably be looked at more closely, thats all. I am far from an expert on the subject, but the numbers are intriguing.
As I understand it the CSA seceded largely because they felt the federal government was going to try to put an end to slavery. They were right, but what would they have done if they were offered money? I would think anyone trained in economics should consider this option.
So your objection to slavery is not that the owner can do anything he wants to the slave, but only that he can sell the slave to another owner?
Well, all that Robin has done in order to create a potential for his argument is to adopt an unusually wide definition of slavery - note that the Wikipedia entry he links to is "List of slaves", not "Slavery", which does indeed say "a form of forced labor in which people are considered to be the property of others".
I didn't understand that you meant the owner wouldn't know his contract was non-binding. I thought you meant everyone would know it was at-will.
I'm not at all interested in the rights of the slaveowner. You were talking about a specific case when the strict enforcement of a valid rule (against slavery) would have led to harm. I was proposing a fudge which, if the slaver knew about it, might have caused him not to make the deal, but I'm not proposing that we inform him of this.
You were proposing that the valid rule (against slavery) be ignored in order to ameliorate a specific case. I was proposing that other valid rules (against deceiving buyers, and against expropriating property owners without compensation) be ignored at a later date in order to liberate the slaves. Enforcing the original illicit transaction as law transforms what was done from a short-term solution of an immediate problem to the permanent institution of slavery enforced by the law of the land. Purists would refuse the compromise I suggested, but your whole game is to discredit purists. So I got down in the gutter with you and gave an answer as cynical as your own.
My real objection was your tendentiously using a single case to discredit a valid law. These kinds of messy act/rule problems come up all the time, and people deal with them in various ways, of which I think yours is the worst.
If we hold the contract to be non-binding then why would anyone buy the slave in the first place? If slavery will help the starving girl it must be because the owner expects the contract to be upheld. Citing other examples where bad things follow from slavery just seems to emphasize my point that it depends. Like life vs death or almost anything else, we don't want to be always in favor or always against, we want our opinion to depend on important details.
In natural states, having some slavery is better than having violent disorder — even for the slaves. That’s why they rarely revolted.
They rarely revolted because of violent order and the absence of refuges, not the fear of violent disorder. Defiance was violently and sometimes lethally punished.
I guess I'll bow out, but I'm astonished at the depths to which contrarianism has sunk. Apparently nowadays you're irrational and uncool if you continue to uphold the conventional anti-slavery position. People are falling all over themselves to prove that they're not PC. Jesus.
Historically, prohibition of the possibility of selling oneself or selling one's children into slavery was constitutive of liberalism and the possibility of a free society. (Locke and Rousseau both wrote about it). It isn't something that people think about much any more because it's been a dead issue for centuries, but at the turning from serfdom to freedom, that was one of the majot issues. I'm amazed to see Hanson so blithe about it,
Setting up stacked hypotheticals in order to refute e general principle by showing that it might do harm in a single case is a cheap debater's trick. "But what if this Haitian girl will starve if not sold into slavery? What if there's no other option? What then, Mr. pious anti-slavery man?" There's never no other option. And the compromise anti-slavery immediate answer in this case might be to allow the sale to take place, but hold it to be non-binding, so that as soon as the slave saw a chance to escape they would have a right to do so. Would Hanson have the Haitian state enforce the slave-owner's rights to his slave?
Cases like the Haitian girl's are fairly common in SE Asia, and "because otherwise she's starve" is the best-case rationalization. Some parents sell their children into slavery to buy TVs. This is really horrible: why did Hanson automatically accept and relay the parents' self-justification? There is a literature on contemporary slaving and the best-case Hanson cites is not typical. But he wants to get the camel's nose into the tent and score contrarian points against moralizers and idealists.
Likewise, renting convicts out to work off their crimes is recent American history, especially in the South (up until the 30s IIRC). It led to a lot of frameup convictions, and the persons enslaved were mostly black. (Recently in Luzerne County PA they had frameup convictions of about 100 kids by corrupt judges paid off by for-pay prisons, so it still could happen today).
In sum, Hanson seems historically ignorant and more a smirky contrarian market-worshipper than a libertarian of any kind. People like Hanson give rationality a bad name.
That quote struck me exactly the same as it did "ad" -- I can't reply to ad's post though, only Doug's.
What about contracts that specify not only that a person may be enslaved (under certain circumstances), but also designate their children (and their children's children, etc.) as slaves?
I have never seen a more succinct demonstation of the fact that the Constitution of the United States means whatever the Supreme Court wants it to.
Of course, the Amendment itself would appear to demonstrate that the Consitution is sometimes so badly worded that it really needs to be ignored.