Posted by Eliza on: 11.30.2006 /
Justice came up in the discussion a few days ago on What makes one person more caring than another? and it’s been one of those topics that keeps popping up everywhere I look lately. In an email exchange recently, a Christian (who does not post here) sent me an essay about naturalistic vs. theistic bases for morality, written in 2005 by Christian Smith (whom I do not know). The part of the essay that ties in best with this topic is:
Modern people tend to believe strongly that all human persons everywhere possess inalienable human rights to life, certain freedoms, respect of conscience, and protection against unwarranted or arbitrary violations of personal property and choices by the government or other persons. The enjoyment of these rights, it is widely believed, is not contingent upon being smart, attractive, wealthy, strong, or any other conditional quality or situation. Simply being a human person endows one with such rights and entitles one to their respect by others.
(Just as background for this discussion: the author feels these humanistic beliefs are based on Judeo-Christian teachings, and feels they have been honed over time as people accept those teachings and, essentially, get it right. But that’s not the reason I bring this quote up here. Also, I’m using justice in the sense of “rights allowed” and injustice in the sense of “rights denied, or not recognized “; you may have other views on how justice and rights interact.)
While I agree that many people (at least in Western cultures) share a belief that people have certain human rights which should be inalienable, it also seemed to me that the author’s examples seem heavily influenced by the Bill of Rights in the U.S. Constitution.
That reminds me that what we see as key “rights” may differ based on our country, culture, and values, as well as the era in which we live.
It’s a reminder that when the U.S. Constitution was written, property-owning white males were the ones who “counted” and that for most people at that time and place that seemed fair and just, with no reason to think otherwise. Clearly, then, the extent of rights, including which people specific rights apply to, can change over time. The abolition of slavery is a huge example.
Using suffrage (voting rights) as another example: it wasn’t until 1870 that the Constitution was amended to prohibit laws restricting voting based on race, and not until 1921 that it was amended to prohibit restrictions based on gender. Just imagine that voting rights could be denied to people of color or to women - we know the history, but it would seem an outrageous injustice to us today. (There have been less sweeping expansions of rights, too; for example, in 1961, the Constitution was amended to allow Americans who happen to live in the District of Columbia to vote in presidential elections. A minor change, unless you live in D.C.)
It makes me wonder: what are the injustices around us today that are hard to see as such, but which will seem obvious in retrospect in 50 or 100 years? (The ones which our grandkids, or their grandkids, will read about in their history books, while they marvel at how old-fashioned the thinking was back in 2006!)
Whether you are Christian, atheist, in between, or have other beliefs, and wherever you live in the world:
Comment by: Helen
1 11/30/06 4:57 AM | Comment Link |Wow, fascinating topic. Thanks Eliza!
One thing I’m thinking is: once we’ve reached equal rights I don’t think there’s any further progress to be made, is there? So a good question might be, where are we not yet granting equal rights?
And this issue of justice complicated - I think - by such things as: what obligation do the rich and powerful have towards those aren’t rich and powerful? Because equal rights to, for example, buy the same thing with the same amount of money doesn’t help people who have no money. Is this a justice issue or is this something else? I think maybe it’s something else, but it could be something equally important to humanity.
It’s very hard for me to relate to the mindset that women don’t get a vote and that it’s ok to own people as property (slaves) if they have a different skin color. I don’t know how to go there mentally. I don’t really understand how people could have thought that way.
PAF, which has recently been mentioned here, is currently pursuing justice and equal rights for women in a certain situation. This highlights that in the US in 2006, many people still believe “women shouldn’t hold certain leadership roles in the church - they are for men only” and “the marriage relationship should incorporate the fundamental inequality that the husband is ‘head’ of the wife”. It is alarming to me that people so easily accept this; I can see why men would, but I find it deeply disturbing that many women do also. This clearly conflicts with equal rights for men and women.
Another complication is the way many Christians want unborn babies at all stages of development to have ‘equal rights’ with babies who are already born, children and adults. To me the way they push this denies appropriate rights to pregnant mothers to make choices about what concerns their own body and their own health.
But the unequal rights we deal with in this country pale in comparison to what we see in some other countries - I don’t want to lose sight of that. I can understand anyone saying “Let’s major on the majors and see what we can to do help people in those other countries who are being denied basic human rights”.
Comment by: HereandNow
2 11/30/06 8:38 AM | Comment Link |Absolutely. If a person tells you they live perfectly justly in relation to themselves and others, run like hell. They are truly a scary person. Current examples of this, where injustice gets tolerated because the solutions are too difficult to comprehend include tolerating the disparity between the quality of education in affluent vs. impoverished school systems, accepting the disparity between quality of health care depending on economic position, etc. These two things illustrate an interesting thing about how we tolerate injustice. I don’t know how to solve either problem because there are many layers to each of them. I tolerate it (while feeling uneasy about it all the while) because I don’t know how to make it better, and because the problems are too big for me to get a handle on. I’m full of opinions, but not solutions.
There’s a whole other catagory of things that are horribly unjust, that entire cultures/races not only tolerate, but refuse to call injustice. By their very nature I can’t tell you about the ones that I’m participating in, but the 20th and 21st century instances of genocide are great case studies for this. In almost every instance, a momentum of rage and horrible atrocity was reached over time. At some point in that period of time, the pendulum switched from racism to genocide. The genocide was accomplished when a certain group of people was dehumanized. The killings didn’t start occurring until a critical mass of people thought of their opponents as animals instead of human beings. But the racism that brings us to that perspective doesn’t begin with that devolved a perception of the “enemy”. It starts with ignorant thoughts like “All those folks from south of the border are taking all our jobs” kind of stuff. “Let’s build a big fence to keep them out.”
It will change, but the practice of both tolerating injustice and being ignorant of it will not go away.
I read an interesting book called The Philosopher and the Monk. It consisted of conversations between a French Philosopher and his son. The father was an atheist and the son was a Buddhist Monk in the Tibetan traditions. In a discussion of rights, the father mentioned that France, in addition to having a Bill of Rights, also had a Bill of Responsibilities. I find this incredibly important. The rights of people can only truly be enjoyed when the responsibilities of people are practiced at the same time. This kind of goes back to a particular aspect of the thread of the conversation that motivated you to post this one in the sense that justice needs to be practiced and pursued in the context of a broader scope than the “self”. I haven’t thought about the following statement much, but it occurs to me that Human Rights are really anything that it is “right” for Humans to do. This encompasses both responsibility and entitlement.
Comment by: Helen
3 11/30/06 9:00 AM | Comment Link |HereandNow wrote:
I like that perspective.
Comment by: Eliza
4 11/30/06 10:51 AM | Comment Link |Helen wrote:
Excellent point. Thanks for the reminder. It’s hard to know, sometimes, how hard to work on a local issue that would be nice to fix, when the bigger global picture points out how much more pressing issues there are.
I like this way of looking at it, but one problem is figuring out when rights are unequal for legitimate reasons, vs. for unfair reasons. I think it’s unfair that felons lose their right to vote, in many states permanently (even after they’ve served their time). But presumably it’s that way because people thought (think?) that committing a felony should result in one losing one’s right to participate in our democracy through voting. I’m heartened that Canada’s Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional a few years ago to deny prisoners the right to vote; I don’t see it changing any time soon in the U.S., but all it would take would be one case taken to the Supreme Court.
Other examples of needing to be clear as a society whether groups are “equal” in the rights discussion are (1) animal rights (animals don’t have responsibilities - do they have rights?) and (2) same sex marriage (or any other legal concept of family). Is a family made up of a man, a woman, and their biological and legally adopted children, end of discussion, or could a family be any couple, or any group of people, which self-identifies as a committed family with responsibilities to each other, worthy of acknowledgement as such & granting of legal protections?
Yes, that does complicate it! In ethics, justice has several different aspects; distributive justice relates to how resources (money, also health care & education) are, well, distributed in a society. Social justice overlaps with distributive justice imo, but is not identical. Legal justice & retributive justice (retribution after a wrong) are other aspects.
Comment by: JG
5 11/30/06 11:21 AM | Comment Link |The issue for me here is what do we use as the basis for rights?
If we discount any religious basis, what do we use instead? If life has come about by chance and we have simply evolved into what we are now, is it not true to say that “rights” are merely what humans collectively decide are the best principles to live by for their common good.
Such decisions are then decided by the majority and enforced on everyone else. So if the majority of people believe that allowing sex with children is not a good thing then that belief is then imposed on all.
This can give rise to interesting dilemmas when these things are considered from a purely philosophical point of view. For instance, principles of natural selection and survival of the fittest would suggest that it is not in the interests of the human race generally for weaker members of the race to reproduce because this in the course of time weaken the human race and make it more likely to fail.
On the other hand, quality of life arguments would point in the opposite direction.
If the majority of people want to do something that harms the miniority, how do you convince the majority not to do it?
Comment by: Karen
6 11/30/06 11:26 AM | Comment Link |Eliza, I agree with you that gay rights and animal rights are at the cutting edge right now.
I am not an animal rights activist, and frankly I have a lot of misgivings about the movement, particularly in its extremist forms. The violence being perpetuated is absolutely reprehensible, for one thing, and I will never agree with that.
But I read something a while back about how it used to be considered a regular form of amusement to do things like round up a big sack of cats, light it on fire, and watch the cats scream and try to escape as they burned to death. No joke. That was what people did for fun with their kids on Saturday nights!
So, it strikes me that we’ve already come a long way toward recognizing that animals do experience pain and have emotions and deserve respectful treatment. That’s probably a byproduct of Darwin’s recognizing that we are all inter-related animals.
I think there’s going to be a major conversation over the next couple of decades or even centuries about how animals have ‘rights’ - if we agree that they do - how we co-exist with them if we’re still going to exploit them for products, how we manage their populations, whether there are degrees of rights afforded to certain animals (will mammals get more rights than rodents, say? vertebrates vs invertebrates? smarter, more “human” animals like primates and dolphins vs animals that have less ‘consciousness’?)
It will be fascinating to see how that whole area of ethics develops, along with the science that tells us more and more about how animals perceive the world. This article,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6100430.stm
about how elephants can recognize themselves in a mirror, is sure to bring new awareness to the whole issue.
Comment by: HereandNow
7 11/30/06 11:40 AM | Comment Link |JG, I think that we can start with being much less focused on telling each other what we can and can’t do. One of my big beefs with churches is when they tend towards making a lot of rules/laws that they universalize. But at least within a church governance, most of us can say that if a church is too resrictive for me to participate in, then I will go elsewhere. When it comes to culture/societies/countries/states, etc., that option is less open to us. I live in Wisconsin, and the majority just voted to say that gay people can’t get married. I don’t think that the majority of people “discounted any religious basis for right and wrong” rather, I think they invoked it. But here, we have an example of the majority choosing what you seem to suggest happens when we “discount” religious basis–Such decisions are then decided by the majority and enforced on everyone else.
Allowing that we aren’t talking about pedophile behavior, we are talking about same-sex partnerships, the state I live in has, by majority rule, just insisted that anyone who lives in the state accept marriage by as conservative christians (and plenty of other people) define it. I find this both unconstitutional, but abusive and controlling.
Comment by: Helen
8 11/30/06 11:57 AM | Comment Link |JG wrote:
Actually JG this is not a good example because some of the reasons against this have to do with children being too immature to give informed consent. Because if an authority figure asked a child, even if the child said yes, we couldn’t be sure they weren’t being coerced into it. The laws are to protect children until they are old enough to give informed consent.
Comment by: Eliza
9 11/30/06 4:29 PM | Comment Link |HereandNow,
This sounds like a really interesting book! I did a little searching after your post on Bill of Responsibilities, found several sites where people suggest a list of responsibilities for Americans; the take-home message seems to be that agreeing on a set of expectations for citizens is probably even more contentious than finding some “rights” most people can agree on!
I like that. I’d been thinking of “rights” in terms of expectations for fair treatment between people - envisioning, for example, that “rights” don’t mean a thing if you’re alone. (As an extreme, picture someone alone at night on top of Mount Everest with inadequate gear.) But there still can be “the right thing to do”, in any situation, whether it be in regard to the environment, or animals, or other people.
Karen - Maybe the changes in zoos over the last few decades (more naturalistic habitats & privacy, fewer wire cages) reflects a trend toward more humane treatment of animals. Thanks for linking to the elephant recognizing self in a mirror - that was amazing to hear about recently. Oops, sorry, I have to go, my dog is telling me it’s his right to have a walk now. ;-)
Comment by: JG
10 11/30/06 4:33 PM | Comment Link |Yes but on what basis do we decide that “informed consent” is required? Why do we have the laws we have? To what extent are they based on biblical values and should they be retained even if biblical values are rejected?
I am not suggesting for a moment that you need faith in order to have morality, not at all. Rather, I am asking how morality is accounted for in a world that has come about purely by chance and life purely through evolution. And how is morality shaped in such circumstances?
For example, would it be right to allow a minority to suffer to enable the majority to benefit?
Comment by: NCxian
11 11/30/06 7:45 PM | Comment Link |I vote for the current conflict about homosexuality as the most likely thing our descendants will gape at when they read about it in history books. I am thinking that scientific advances about the genetic determination of sexual orientation will eventually rule the day, and homosexuality will be accepted as a normal human variant like skin and eye color. And I think our churches will one day be apologizing for the damage they are currently causing in this arena, just as they have apologized for racism, slavery.
The other thing I was going to suggest was access to health care, but I find myself waffling on that. I do believe that one day, everybody will have access to a certain level of health care and will look back at this time with wonder. Like we look back with amazement on a time when barbers were pharmicists and that kind of thing. However, this is such a complicated area to think about. For instance, my “certain level of health care” above is quite a muddy thing. Will everybody, regardless of age and health, one day be entitled to a heart transplant? The cost of organ transplants, the scarcity of organs–I suspect these kinds of things will always be a limiting factor on what health care a person is entitled to and what is over that level. Unless, of course, we reach a time like in Star Trek when technology renders everything “not scarce” because we have replicators!
Comment by: HereandNow
12 11/30/06 8:17 PM | Comment Link |I want the transport technology before the replicator. (smiles).
I do think that health care is a ver complicated issue, but I also think that it is one where injustices are carried out every day (by providers, patients, drug companies, insurance companies, and the government). Something’s gotta change.
Something that JG said
is something I hear a lot, and my simple answer is that however random the origins of the universe are if we live in a world that wasn’t created in the way that conservative Christians believe it was, the formation of cultures and societies requires codification of laws. The discipline of ethics is the outcome of civilization (in spite of the fact that civilizations almost always go overboard with writing and enacting laws).
I’m off to North Dakota with my little yellow lab for the weekend. I look forward to continuing with this if it’s still going when I get back.
Peace,
HereandNow
Comment by: trissa
13 11/30/06 11:48 PM | Comment Link |It is unjust that my gay and lesbian friends cannot marry the person they love. Someday we will realize that we(the majority)have marginalized yet another group of people.
Comment by: Eliza
14 12/1/06 1:02 AM | Comment Link |JG wrote:
That’s the question the essayist delves into, in the essay I quoted in the opening post, so I’ve been thinking and reading about this for the past week, considering how to respond to him.
A priori, there wouldn’t be any reason to think that a moral code would develop in a universe without a God - but that assumes that the basis for ethics and morality is external to humans, and that morality is totally separate from any biological drives, thus God is necessary in order for there to be right and wrong, & to impose morality.
Instead, maybe it’s the other way around; maybe humans (or other sentient, reflective, empathic beings) are what’s necessary for a system of ethics and morality to develop. In that case, God might have created the necessary starting conditions but doesn’t otherwise meddle, or perhaps morality was simply attributed by humans to God (whether or not God exists).
Empathy and morality may indeed have developed through evolution (if acting for the good of the group was more often likely to improve chances for survival than acting selfishly, etc), though I know that suggestion will seem bizarre and improbable to many people. Humans are social animals (social beings, if you prefer) & seem designed for social grouping. We communicate with each other via language, we are helpless for the first few years of life, we are without natural defenses against predators and the elements & must create those defenses with our brains and hands - and teamwork.
The human brain does seem to have a native capacity for morality, though how this manifests is obviously influenced by upbringing, culture, & psychological factors (like sociopathy, attachment disorder, etc). Humans (and even some monkeys studied) fire “mirror neurons” when they watch someone do something or show an emotion - a neurological basis for empathy. Empathy is present in children at about 2 yrs of age (and a few recent studies claim that infants mirror emotions they see on adult faces, suggesting that rudimentary empathy may be present well before it could be learned). Anyway, that’s just a taste of what’s out there to support the idea that morality has been hard-wired into our brains via evolution. Five books have been published in the past 2 yrs on this topic; I’d be delighted to post that list if anyone is interested.
Doesn’t this question arise no matter what the basis for morality is, theistic or humanistic? The problem is, what is the greater good - and how do we determine this - and who gets to decide how various factors are weighed in the “calculation”? The fact is that we do allow a minority to suffer in many instances, sometimes but not always so the majority can benefit.
Restriction of (civil) marriage to a man and a woman is, imo, an example. Gay couples can attest that not being allowed to marry causes them to suffer (& miss out on societal rights & benefits that come with marriage). Same-sex marriage is prohibited not so the majority can benefit tangibly, but perhaps so the majority can avoid the discomfort of “allowing” something which many of them feel is unnatural and immoral, but which doesn’t actually impact them directly. IMO, BICBW.
Comment by: Eliza
15 12/1/06 1:18 AM | Comment Link |Clarification - people may ask, wouldn’t there have been a survival advantage to leaving the weak and sick behind, quite the opposite of what we think of as moral behavior today? Perhaps yes - but perhaps no. The group would have to protect the children, of course, in order to perpetuate the group. There may also have been an advantage to protecting the elderly and sick, too - they may have offered services to the group despite their weaknesses (say, if grandma is the one who has the experience to know which berries are poisonous, and the injured uncle is the spiritual leader of the group, and the woman who can’t walk very fast is breastfeeding her baby - which will die if she isn’t helped along by the group).
And/or, maybe the urge to help the helpless is evolutionarily misdirected - it wouldn’t be the first example in which the human brain expands a neurological system beyond its original intent. Optical illusions are a good example. Pattern recognition is another example; the human brain is expert at it, with the spillover effect that we see patterns, linkages, connections all the time when they’re not really there.
So, maybe extending “rights” to the underdogs is just “group protection” gone overboard - in a way that we now value highly.
Comment by: Eliza
16 12/1/06 1:45 AM | Comment Link |HereandNow - have a great weekend, and scratch your dog behind the ears for me!
NCxian - Your assessment of homosexuality as the most likely area to undergo a major change in thinking sounds right on the mark to me. It’s interesting that it’s an area of behavior rather than appearance, so less visibly obvious than race or gender (or eye color) - especially when people with that trait try to blend in with the majority. I wonder if it would have been addressed head-on earlier if it weren’t so easy to sweep under the rug.
Access to health care - ahh, yes, what a mess! It seems like it can only get better, since it’s hard to imagine it getting worse. (Famous last words!) But there are so many contentious issues, including what to cover, and of course the big one - the cost. I interview applicants for our local medical school, & often they’ll suggest that providing coverage for preventive care should be top priority as a change in the health care system in the US. Sounds great, but it’s too simple by far to be a solution. The major improvements in population health have come from changes at the public health level (clean water, adequate nutrition, vaccinations, consistent messages about the dangers of smoking, behavior change to reduce risk of HIV and STDs). People often mean screening tests when they say “prevention”, but a mammogram (for example) never prevented a case of breast cancer - it can only find cases (among all of the red-herring “false-positive” abnormal mammograms. The idea is to find breast cancers (for example) earlier this way, but any change in health from the mammogram, for better or worse, comes from subsequent treatment, so then we’re back to the issue of covering diagnostic studies and treatment. And prevention won’t keep organ transplants from being necessary, though there are some measures that could reduce the number of people who eventually end up needing to go on transplant lists (which would presumably not reduce the number of transplants, just the number of people who die while awaiting a transplant). Ay yi yi, yes, a mess.
Comment by: joe
17 12/1/06 2:52 AM | Comment Link |I actually think the most pressing issues are those of poverty and wealth. When 70% of the world’s population have a very meagre existance whilst 30% of us live in wealth - there is a massive moral issue there. Those of us who believe that treating your neighbour with respect cannot sit back and watch them die from our position of wealth and security.
That is not to say that there are not important issues of injustice and rights in our society. Generally, I want to live in a society where people are able to do things I find offensive - and where others’ offense is not the criteria for legality. Yet I also appreciate that in cultures where virtually the whole population over the age of 40 have died of AIDS, these concerns look rather less important.
I think we will also live to regret our labelling of whole races of people as ‘evil’. Whilst it might be natural to draw a line of ‘them’ and ‘us’ between peoples, the whole of human history teaches that this sledgehammer-to-crack-a-nut philosophy does far more damage than it helps.
In an era and a culture where so many claim to be Christians, it is telling that so few of us actually live up to the beatitudes and the rest of the sermon on the mount. Sorry to bring the gospel into it… but I’m aware that it is basically what I’m talking about…
Comment by: Karen
18 12/1/06 11:22 AM | Comment Link |Eliza:
I agree with both of you on this one.
The best analogy I’ve seen to sexual orientation is ‘handed-ness’ - like left-handedness or righthandedness.
So left-handedness (like homosexuality) is a minority orientation, it’s behavioral (so less obvious than something like skin color), it was demonized for centuries as “unnatural” or “evil,” and kids that naturally started to show left-handed preference were sometimes even trained (quite torturously, apparently) to prefer the right hand. Similarly, closeted homosexuals over the centuries have often lived out their days in heterosexual relationships, constantly fighting against same-gender attractions.
I haven’t studied it extensively, but I think it was probably when brain research illuminated the way our handedness is hardwired biologically that the final “stigma” associated with left-handedness was erased.
Now we’re starting to see some interesting ways personalities differ in corrolation with handedness - lefties have some really creative ways of viewing things that some of us (more “conventional”) righties lack!
I hope that as the biological basis for homosexuality becomes better understood, some of the “traits” of same-sex orientation will be viewed more as positives than as reasons to ridicule or marginalize gay people.
Comment by: Eliza
19 12/1/06 7:27 PM | Comment Link |joe said:
joe, I think most of us agree this is a (the) major issue. But the causes and solutions seem somewhat different than, say, voting rights or other civil rights, and harder to address, because potential re-distribution of wealth & resources is likely to be vigorously resisted by those with the wealth & resources (even very well-meaning comfortably well-off people). I’d guess that abolition of slavery was more like this, because slaves were important sources of labor for the South (as well as being commodities) - abolition of slavery directly threatened the pocketbook of the South. Equitable access to health care also seems to be difficult for this same reason - solutions would require taking resources from people who already have them, to give to people who don’t (unless someone can figure out how to make the whole pie bigger!).
It’s tragic, when the degree of disparity is so huge, and a relatively small amount of resource re-distribution could significantly improve the lives of people who are desperately in need now.
Comment by: Eliza
20 12/1/06 7:33 PM | Comment Link |Karen,
Left-handedness - yes! I hadn’t thought of that (even though I’m a leftie). My grandmother had her left hand tied behind her back when she was a schoolchild in Germany, & was forced to learn to write with her right hand.
From Wikipedia come these particularly negative past views of left-handed people:
Definitely qualifies as a trait which led to unjust treatment in the past, at least at times. Interesting that it’s now mostly a non-issue. Though, I have heard of grandparents hoping out loud that their grandkids turn out to be right-handed, and there’s the whole issue of tools (like scissors) being designed for righties. (Why can’t soup ladles be made with a lip on both sides, instead of just on the side that right-handed people pour from??)
Comment by: Karen
21 12/2/06 3:08 PM | Comment Link |Eliza:
Okay, now why does that totally NOT surprise me?! ;-)
Oh my, how cruel! And yet no doubt her family thought they were doing her a favor, or that such training was a “necessary evil.”
Thanks for the Wiki quotes. I hadn’t really thought about the biblical placement of “good” people “at the right hand of god” before, but that’s so true!
Comment by: NCxian
22 12/2/06 3:46 PM | Comment Link |Left-handedness is a great analogy, Karen. Quite empowering for me, actually. The next time my leftie husband and I have a gayness discussion, I’ll pull it out. (He’s a militant leftie, but ambivelent about homosexuality–mostly because of that “eww, gross” reflex, I think).
Comment by: Eliza
23 12/2/06 3:58 PM | Comment Link |To extend the analogy, in some cultures there has been an “eww, gross” reflex against lefties because the left hand was to be used for wiping one’s bottom in the bathroom, and the right hand kept clean for eating (without utensils). (The Wikipedia page above mentions the cultures in which this was/is found.)
Comment by: NCxian
24 12/2/06 7:37 PM | Comment Link |Ooh, that’s good, Eliza. I’m taking notes!
Comment by: Clay
25 07/15/07 6:17 PM | Comment Link |Helen posted: It’s very hard for me to relate to the mindset that women don’t get a vote and that it’s ok to own people as property (slaves) if they have a different skin color. I don’t know how to go there mentally. I don’t really understand how people could have thought that way.
This seems to typify most posters on this site; don’t understand it and not going to try.
There was a reason landowners mattered. There was a reason women did not vote. There was a reason for slavery, not a good one, but there was one.
A lot of talk about equality. Equality is not guaranteed anywhere, not in the declaraion of Independence or in the Bill of rights. I do not believe it is a right, nor just, to steal from the rich and give to the poor. Redistribution of wealth may sound good but it sounds like stealing, greed, envy, and jealousy to me.