- When a Mommy human and a Daddy human love each other veeeeery much, they have incredibly kinky sex until Mommy gets pregnant.
If you paid attention in your high school science class, you'll remember that homo sapiens are diploid organisms, meaning that our chromosomes come in sets of two. Meiosis, the process through which gametes are produced in the testes and ovaries, splits and recombinates each parent's DNA, meaning an already unique sequence is given random alterations. What results from the meeting of two matching gametes is the combination of two somewhat scrambled unique sequences, making a new sequence that is neither mother nor father.
This new sequence has never existed before, and can never exist again.
This is the definition of an "individual"
- Sapience is a product of sufficiently complex cognition. Humans may have been the first species to evolve and demonstrate it on this planet but we will certainly not be the last. The very moment dogs are shown, publicly and beyond the shadow of any doubt, to possess Sapience they are immediately and automatically conferred Personhood without objection.
There is no strict threshold, to the dismay of myself and many others. There seems to be something about language development and theory of mind that gives it away, but I am not educated enough to comment on this.
Whales are close. Elephants are close. Prairie Dogs are close.
It constantly shocks me that there are people in this modern day that do not believe you own your body and your thoughts. In most cases, the fault is with the church, which peddles the particularly reprehensible doctrine of slavery to extradimensional entities.
That which contains your DNA is your property, regardless of attachment. As the owner of your body, you are ethically empowered to do with it as you please, to include modification, monetization, and termination. This conception of bodily autonomy is the foundation of libertarian ideals, and without it the door to the most heinous kinds of tyrannies is left ajar.
This ownership logically extends to your mind, which is the product of your brain activity, and all the thoughts it generates. They're all yours, pleasant or distressful, and this acknowledgement serves both as defense of copyright and defense against thought-policing.
Immutable characteristics, whether externally perceivable or internally sensed, are of little if any consequence in matters of ethics.
The trend of categorizing Persons based on invented social concepts like race, ethnicity, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, and disability is the single longest-lived meme of human civilization, proliferated most extensively by the church (ask your pastor why the Israelites were so desperate to pretend they were not ethnically Canaanite).
The death of phrenology in the mid-1800s revealed a basic fact to all people of sound mind: only those who intend to benefit from being classified above advocate for classifying others below. If Europeans had any reason to believe Africans might possess a superiority, they would not have vocalized a desire for racial hierarchy. Thus, all tension regarding immutable characteristics can be safely labeled as mere tribalism, framed through an external locus of control.
The death of bigoted culture begins with the birth of egalitarian culture, conceived by the realization that all labels that modify "Person" are matters of mere vanity, holding no meaningful insight on an individual's nature.
For a concept of human rights to have utility, they must have universality.
Rights that are afforded to some but not others are not rights, but simply advantages taken by force. A system made up of advantages, distributed unevenly and unequally, is a tyranny regardless of the specific label you plaster on its face. A tyranny will expand and oppress until there are no scapegoats left to blame, and then it will begin to cannibalize itself.
The truth is, no matter what rung on the ladder you would end up having (looking at you, middle-to-high class white people), give the tyranny you built enough time and it will get hungry enough to consider eating you.
The concept of "free speech" is something we hear about often, especially by those who believe in it the least. Nobody seems to agree on what it means, mostly because the document that coined the term was vague in its execution.
The United States Constitution reads: "Congress shall make no law [...] abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press"
Good, but not good enough.
Because your thoughts are your property, you have the right to transfer ownership of those thoughts as you see fit, including via open transmission, and those who wish to receive those thoughts have a right to hear you.
Note that this is not a condemnation of protesting distasteful speakers in public spaces, nor of disrupting their transmission through non-violative transmission of your own. It is a condemnation of state regulation of broadcast media, though.
Anyone seen the meme "The Myth of Consensual Sex"?
"Mutual voluntarism"is a fancy term for consent, which serves as foundational to libertarian ideals. There is no better metric for basally determining whether a Dispute has occurred between Persons than to ask if everyone consented to the interaction in question.
This concept is already well-understood in social groups that care a lot about making sure everyone is enjoying their time, like BDSM and kink communities (shocker, I know). Just as in a kink scene, our societies operate on a kind of contract, where we all make efforts to negotiate our interactions.
The obvious caveat here is this flies in the face of what we call "anti-discrimination laws", which are designed to prevent selective dissociation based on immutable characteristics. In my mind, bigotry is a bad business strategy that is liable to crash economies of scale, but history disagrees, and so I must concede that ethics are not penal codes. Leave the heavy lifting for the policy wonks, kids.
The operative word here is "proportionally," which means the minimum amount of force needed to terminate a threat, which usually winds up being an equal amount of force.
Threats are measured in levels of the reactor's (victim's) vulnerability to the actor (perpetrator). Any number of factors can affect this calculation, but those factors must be articulable and demonstrable.
This extends from bodily ownership and autonomy, as well as from the Possessive Right. Your word is your bond, which means the bond belongs to you and you are therefore responsible for and to it.
Even toddlers, who ostensibly have next to no knowledge of society or social conventions, have an integrated understanding of what is "mine"and what is "theirs". More importantly than this, our extant primate cousins also seem to have this integrated understanding, suggesting the conceptualization of possession as a discrete status that can be used to associate social actors and external objects is, fundamentally, a matter of biological inheritance.
With apologies to the Primitivists in the back; their heads just explode on occasion, don't mind them.
There is only one Monster, but it has many instances running simultaneously. The instance of the Monster currently operating in China is one and the same with the instance of the Monster currently operating in Kiribati, even if it doesn't recognize itself in each other.
Want to make a Nationalist cry? Show them their altars look the same as their enemy's.
Your Personhood is... well, yours. You can do with it what you wish, though you only have three valid moves to make: retain them, transact them, or surrender them.
Other individual Persons are not able to transact for your Personhood as it has unique value and properties. Constituencies, as a class, can properly transact for your Personhood with another object of similarly unique value and properties: Power.
Power, Institutional Power, is the force employed by the Monster when it is permitted to eat. It is the violence or threat of violence levied against those that run afoul of the Law, or more realistically, those who run afoul of the Monster's Agents.
This object, Power, has both great value and great potential for societal impact, and so should not be obtainable for free. Power must have a price, and that price must be something of equal or greater value to those who might seek to obtain it.
And what is more valuable than your Personhood?
It is a universally understood concept that no well-adjusted Person has ever sought Institutional Power over another human being. You think about it every time you watch the news, every time you watch prices go up, every time we start a new war.
They're all vipers. Every last one of them, no matter the title, no matter the station. They all share the same fundamentally psychopathic urge to control and aggress upon others, and so they are naturally inclined to positions of Power, where their every action is backed by the full force of the Monster's monopoly on violence. This is how they all see you, how they all treat you, how they all conceptualize their relationship with you: Disobey and be crushed, or comply and be allowed to keep your teeth.
Your local city council member, your Senator, the Sheriff two counties over, none of them became psychopaths because of their jobs. They sought out their jobs because they're psychopaths.
Derived from the universality of rights. Those who wish others to not be protected will not be protected.
Observation is not negation.
Imagine you are standing next to me, and we are both observing John Doe, who is holding a kitten in his hand. For you to say that he is not holding a kitten in his hand is to deny a true proposition. This is what the fascist does when he says his favored outgroup has no rights.
Now imagine that we both observe Jane Doe appear around a corner and apporach John Doe. She offers to transact with him for the kitten he is holding in his hand. She offers him money, he hands over the kitten. For you to say that John Doe does not have a kitten in his hand is no longer to deny a true proposition, because you observed the transaction occur.
Now imagine that John is your party's candidate for Senator, the kitten is his Personhood, Jane is the Monster, and the money is Institutional Power. In saying that, from the moment John accepted the position until the moment his term expires, he is not a Person is not to dehumanize him, but rather a recognition that he has dehumanized himself knowingly and willingly. One does not lose protection from a universal conception of human rights in merely observing and affirming that others do not wish to have theirs.