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?
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.
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.
Maybe. I guess authoritarianism is good sometimes.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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?
Enforcing an equal opportunity environment is only authoritarian if your definition of authoritarian is anything that challenges antinomianism.
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.
If it was legal for certain people to slap certain other people, then the people doing the slapping would have the authority over the people being slapped to slap them. But then if the law was changed and took away their authority to slap them, that would be using authority over those slappers to stop them. Does this make sense? Both can be true at the same time
You’ve now described a second scenario in which authority is being removed and not added.
But authority can be used/imposed to take away some else’s authority, can’t it? Or can authority only be used to do something to someone, not to prevent someone from doing something?
What these questions are missing is that the government didn’t start from a place of neutrality, they started by enforcing the institution of slavery. They didn’t go from having no authority over slavery to having all of it, rather the authority they had remained static. The only variable for the amount of authority then is that the classes of “slave” and “slave owner” stopped being a thing, so there were no longer slave owners that had absolute authority over slaves.
No. Protecting human rights is not authoritarian.
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.
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.
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.
