I think it had to do with how other domains often have new words for things specific to it, but law, in addition to that, frequently redefines existing words and phrases to mean extremely specific things in particular legal contexts. These redefinitions often are not intuitive to the everyday user of the word or phrase. IMO, this is a big reason why lay opinions seem to matter less. That is, they are often commenting on a message that differs from the actual content of the legal text to such a degree as to be "not even wrong", as it were.
The problem here (as I see it) is that the definition of liberty is very subjective, and yet people make arguments like yours based on the premise that their personal definition of liberty is an objective truth.
But who draws the "human liberty" line? Where and how does "human liberty" and "individual liberty" intersect? Is the Non Aggression Principle the doctrine on this? Or something more progressive that helps ensure minority rights? Some other option entirely?
Liberty and humanism are topics built on millennia of context and nuance. Blanket statements like yours, while passionate, risk being so reductionist that they distract from the important substance of the conversation.
It's for the same reasons that amending constitutions require more buy-in than just changing laws.
You can establish things that you think are "very important" in a society, and make it much harder to change than other things.
Of course, if everyone thinks you're the king of France, you're the king of France. But establishing rules to counterbalance the state's monopoly on violence and making those be pretty strong protections within the framework of laws helps establish the norms!
Everything has an asterisk in these kinds of conversation. I think most people can understand the relative difference in values between "people should have a right to assemble and speak their mind" and "people should be able to park on the left side of this street on weekends"
The idea of someone drawing lines is positivist bullshit. The Declaration of Independence was grounded on the bedrock of Natural law, and the bedrock of the Constitution was the common law. The context for both was American but the principles therein are Universal.
Liberty is the natural order, but liberties can be tempered by morals and laws. If they existed not in nature, but as a set of approved rights granted to you by secular authorities, then your liberty is not your liberty, but your license.
75 years, and slavery has existed for thousands of years prior (and that’s most likely an understatement), and continues to exist even in the present day in different forms.
The difference now is whether it is State-sanctioned or not, and sometimes it still is. Liberty is natural, but laws and morality act as the limiting principle. Without them, martial power is the rule and only another martial power can counteract another from engaging in the trade and enslavement of people; but law can also prevent selling yourself into slavery as a way of settling debts. The 13th Amendment is a general prohibition article, one of the only two ever adopted, and the 18th was later rescinded by the 21st.
No idea what you are talking about, really. matter of fact, all major powers of the time, France and Great Britain, had abolished it at least 50 years prior to the US. Both of these powers were monarchies.
France made slavery in mainland France illegal in 1315, in the colonies they had laws regulating the slave trade, as disgusting as it still is, that made torture and family seperation illegal. This Code Noir resulted in 13.2% of freed slaves in Loissiana compared to 0.8% in Mississipi. No lesser person than Robbespierre abolished slavery in France and its colonies in 1794, until t was shortly reintroduced under Napoleon in the colonies.
The British Empire made the international slave trade illegal in the Empire in 1807, in 1833 slavery was abolished in the Empire as a whole, it was achived mostly in 1838.
Tunesia abolished it in 1846, Romania in 1855.
Some countries were late to abolish it, some went faster. But only the US needed a Civil War to some around. And of the major powers, the US was the only democracy, all others were monarchies at the time slavery was abolished in the main lands.
You're missing a couple of data points. 1806 The United States Congress passed the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves, which took effect January 1st, 1808. The 1807 law the British Parliament passed didn't take effect until March 1808. 1808 was also the soonest the United States Congress was able to ban the importation of Slaves under Article I Section 9 of the Constitution. In effect, the British Empire stopped trading slaves when its largest market for slaves stopped importing them. Just to round this out, while you are partially right because Brazil at this time was not its own nation, it was later than the United States in abolishing slavery by about 23 years, 1888.
You missed the point of my post though: the difference between slavery today and slavery in the 18th Century is whether it is state sanctioned or not. There is an extant global slave trade that is larger than the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade at its peak, but now it is a mostly black market trade.
The 13th Amendment has a flaw as well; it allows for prison slavery.
> Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
The Black Codes passed within the Antebellum South made full use of this qualifier to essentially criminalize Blackness and re-enslave Freedmen through the prison system.
I'm not saying it was just, nor am I denying the hypocrisy present within the Constitution at the time of its ratification which is in direct contradiction to the spirit of the Declaration of Independence. That said, there is such a thing as voluntary slavery, and debt bondage. The former was a means of providing for yourself or your child and is a practice that was recorded as far back as the Code of Hammurabi. The latter has a history in the Americas, Asia, Europe and Africa, and is still widespread in South Asia and Subsaharan Africa. Voluntary slavery is a liberty, but because the 13th Amendment does not make any kind of distinction, it is prohibited along with all other forms except prison slavery, hence my characterization of the 13th as a prohibition article.
You can fault the United States for being one of the last countries to (mostly) abolish slavery if you like. That's fine, but it's not the criticism I would levy, there's plenty of Reconstruction Era and post-Reconstruction Era problems stemming from how poorly the Lincoln Amendments were written which were written with the best of intentions, badly. There's also the fact that the Emancipation Proclamation was in 1862 and the 13th Amendment was passed in 1865 just prior to the end of the Civil War. It's now been 155 years, and the 13th Amendment has been in force over twice as long as all of the clauses related to slavery in the Constitution.
In the absence of law though, there is often slavery. Peoples who are weaker than their neighbors and have nothing else to offer are usually enslaved by their neighbors. If you don't have greater martial power and it isn't costly to take you, you're dead, or a slave.
I don't think liberty is the natural order, but something we have to fight to keep, each generation has to carry that fight. Once it is gone it will be a lot harder to regain.
Another thing is that liberty is very difficult to define, and anything from a libertarian paradise to a socialist one (as in Scandinavia) can be the most liberty for different people.
You see, I disagree but not entirely. I do think it is the natural order, but that you are right, you have to fight to keep it.
America is a good example of where we used anti-democratic institutions towards democratic ends. We retained a parliamentary body, but we subordinated it to the Constitution rather than maintaining the premise of parliamentary supremacy. We retained the previous makeup of Congress in the Senate much to Madison’s chagrin, and even improved it somewhat by going from 1 State Vote to 1 State 2 Separate Votes; in exchange we got buy in during the ratification conventions. We put an elected official in Office in place of a King, with term renewal. We introduced an Electoral College into the process because these were the pre-Telegraph pre-Railroad days where it might take six weeks to go from the Potomac to Philadelphia, and made Congress the fallback when the EC couldn’t decide on an overall winner (this process was expected to be used more than it has been, most notably in 1824). We came up with political parties, and they functioned very well for a long time at keeping riffraff and people morally unfit for Office from ever coming close to the White House, up until we threw open the doors to the smoke filled rooms and made it so any DINO or RINO could run for President under the Party banner which is now we ended up with President Trump and Bernie Sanders was twice a serious contender in the Democratic Primary despite not serving as a member of the Democratic Party. Juries have absolute power over one simple question: guilty or not guilty, and peoples’ lives hang in the balance of that question.
Liberty is natural, but we do temper it with morals (it is sinful to kill) and laws (we will execute killers). There is no justice in lawlessness, and if men were Angels we wouldn’t need justice.
> Another thing is that liberty is very difficult to define, and anything from a libertarian paradise to a socialist one (as in Scandinavia) can be the most liberty for different people.
This speaks to our collective failure as a society to regulate our morals and understand our liberty. In part it is because we rely too much upon the State to do so for us. What societal understanding we do have of our own liberty is rooted in our liberties under the Common law, which despite its name, is as much tradition as it is law, traditionally tempered by Courts of law and equity, but which can be overturned by statute; and the natural law.
We don’t have a law saying that you have a right to live, to have sex, to have children, and to form a family. Nor do we have laws saying that you have a right to engage in commerce. These are rights, but not rights in the positivist sense where the State will provide these things for you under rational principles, but rights that are intrinsic to being born alive and grow healthy enough to engage in these pursuits. If you are sterile, you cannot sue for a remedy from nature for this misfortune, although our society is vast enough and complex enough that you might still form a family by other means, it is not owed to you.
