re: What Makes Us All Radically Equal (The New York Times, 2019, October 10)
The trouble with premising your respect for people on the existence of souls is that they don't exist, which puts everything built on their sand at imminent risk of collapse. Human history shows just how easily souls can be denied to others when demagoguery or the like find that convenient: it is not difficult to deny what lacks any substance.
A sturdier foundation for respect might be personhood, which can be defined, albeit with argument about exactly what does and does not count, and better still, can be measured objectively. No one can say what colour, size, shape or other measurable quality a soul might have, but the qualities of being a person, such as self awareness, are clearly defined, meaningful and measurable: most humans have more self awareness than chimpanzees and pigs, who in turn have more than your average lizard, prawn or rose. Personhood is also defined by, for example, having interests, goals, and values, which are again real, measurable qualities: your average human over age two has desires, plans for the future, and moral notions of fairness, some of which are shared to varying degrees by other species to which we are related.
Reality is a much sounder foundation for building respect than something fake, however alluring the fakery might dress itself up. All persons have the same inalienable rights in virtue of being persons. Souls are not needed to quality.
Clarifying reply
I should add that for each quality of personhood that bestows a right, you have it or you don't. If you have that quality, then the associated rights of being a person come with it absolutely.
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The above comments were submitted as two by Felix Qui to the The New York Times article.
They are published there at
- https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/10/opinion/frederick-douglass-detroit.html#commentsContainer&permid=103039500:103039500
and - https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/10/opinion/frederick-douglass-detroit.html#commentsContainer&permid=103039500:103039539
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