No. Protecting human rights is not authoritarian.
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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.
I was about the comment a similar thing.
If having a law that restricts one's ability to do something is "authoritarian" then any law is authoritarian, because laws, by definition, determine what behaviour is and isn't allowed within a society.
questions like this nicely demonstrate how worthless a concept "authoritarianism" really is
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.
No, it was anti-authoritarian, as it removed the authority slave holders had over their slaves.
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.
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.
Letting slavers exercise absolute authority over slaves is authoritarian and letting that system remain is authoritarian.
Insofar as authoritarian is a useful metric (not very), Yes and it was good
Yes it's autharitarian to ban slavery. Kind like a revolution is autharitarian. Don't really get the people who don't want to impose , what ya gonna do? Ask nicely?
Natural language is inherently imprecise. You're going to have to add a contextual definition if you want this to have a single answer.
If making someone do something is always authoritarian, abolition is authoritarian to slavers and anti-authoritarian to slaves. If implementing a law with no checks and balances is authoritarian, it was authoritarian when Louis XIV did it, but maybe not in other cases. If a policy that upholds any kind of hierarchy is authoritarian, it's always anti-authoritarian.
I would go further to say that if "making someone do something" is the definition, literally any action taken by any government is authoritarian. If a government did not make people do things, it would functionally cease to be.
Yes, and it was good authority to exercise.
I think it is a bit unfair to give you shit for your question.
it is normal to confuse authoritarian system with restrictions of freedom. Because generally that is how it works. But not in this case...
Because it is the paradox of tolerance all over again. Technically it is authoritarian to ban slavery but it would be more authoritarian to allow it as people would own people... So on the scale of how authoritarian an action is, banning slavery is as anti-authoritarian as it gets and allowing slavery is as authoritarian as it gets. (Of course, a world without slavery and without any rules would be less authoritarian but... I think we know better than trying that with slavery)
I hope this helps in actually understanding the reason instead of being told what it is.
It’s not at all unfair when instead of thanking people for their answers, they’re rewording what they have said to ask in a different way just to try to act like their hypothesis is right.
Playing Devil’s Advocate is one thing, taking the time to try to effectively say that people should think Lincoln was authoritarian because he removed a legal “right” is another.
The STAMP act was legal, and our ancestors rebellled and got a country out of it (among other things). Law does not make right. And that’s what the OP doesn’t understand. He’s using semantics to try to make up something that simply isn’t true.
Edit: And technically Lincoln didn’t change the law, the 13th Amendment did. Lincoln simply created a proclamation that slaves in most areas (note that it wasn’t all slaves everywhere in the states, deals were struck to omit some areas from the proclamation) are to be considered free because it was a way to help win the Civil War. It was both morally right, and a strategic move. If that is to be considered authoritarian, then every single executive order that presidents make should also be considered authoritarian. But again, it’s simply not true in our system of government (however plagued by dysfunction it is these days).
"Have these gentlemen ever SEEN a" yadda yadda
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.
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. A nation that allows slavery doesn't practice human rights. For human rights to exist they have to apply to everyone, which can't work if some people are considered property.
No amount of gotchas, or arguing semantics is going to make slavery okay, and the way you're replying to peoples answers makes me think you fundamentally don't understand the question.
Your rights end at the point where they infringe on someone else's rights.
Like, it's my right to walk where I want but it's not my right to walk into your house. Because it's your right to own private property.
Secondly, authoritarianism is not about how many people the law affects. It's about style of governance.
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.
WTF, no. Democracies can be authoritarian. If they abridge rights or compel individuals to action, that's authoritarianism. Doesn't matter it 51 people out of a hundred think they can boss the the other 49 because they voted on it.
That sounds just like what the losing side will say tbh. Brexit is bad, but it's a bad choice made by the majority, in that it's still a democratic process voted by the masses. Democracy is a system, it's the will of the people, not a moral alignment. It's democracy as long as the people affected by the result is there to vote.
Democracy can be authoritarian but then it will be called authoritarian, not democracy.
Depends on what you get to vote on, who gets to vote, if their votes count, etc.
A more democratic system could have done something like, we'll test run Brexit for a few years, make an assessment, and then allow everybody to vote again to continue Brexiting or roll it back. But that's not going to happen because ... well... representative democracy is authoritarian by design. Nobody is going to put a "Roll Back Brexit" question on a ballot who championed a pro-Brexit stance and will fight any attempt to give the people a chance to vote again (heck, they'll probably fight tooth and nail to keep any useful assessments of the effects of Brexit from being pushed into the public sphere to help voters make informed decisions as well).
It is exactly what people in the minority will say. I, as someone often finding myself in the minority, say it often and early. Just because more people agree on something doesn't mean they get to force the rest of us to go along with them.
Representative Democracies are, by definition, authoritarian. A small number of people are elected, democratically, to make the decisions for the majority.
Is the decision to end slavery a majority decision? Then it's democratic.
With the contradiction being that the people who were pro slavery could just decide, "Nah, we're not going to end slavery", and continue to do slavery. Which I'm pretty sure is generally how that went in the USA.
Significantly less authoritarian than slavery.
There’s no such thing as consensual slavery, so I’m gonna go with no. You have to draw the line somewhere, and drawing the line at forcing other people to do things seems like a good place to draw the line.
Enforcing an equal opportunity environment is only authoritarian if your definition of authoritarian is anything that challenges antinomianism.
Yes.
But slavery was also authoritarian.
Any situation where there is a power imbalance that can be enforced through physical or psychological means that somebody doesn't agree with is authoritarian. Employer/employee? Authoritarian. Parent/infant? Authoritarian. Bank/bank customer? Authoritarian. Doctor/patient? Authoritarian.
Probably the only reasonable definition of authoritarian would be something like, "To be ruled/governed by an authority." I've decided that Bill over there gets to be in charge of things, they're the authority. I don't always agree with the decisions they make but they're in charge. Which seems like it would overlap a bit with the idea of democratic centralism.
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.