Race and rights

Abstract

[Negroes] had … been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect … This opinion was at that time fixed and universal in the civilized portion of the white race. It was regarded as an axiom in morals as well as in politics, which no one thought of disputing … United States Supreme Court, Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) Though appropriate, the easy assertion by mainstream philosophers that all normal adult human beings are paradigm rightholders rings hollow against the background of American history, in which the opposite proposition has been quietly believed and loudly defended in the courts and legislatures to the detriment of nonwhites, women, and the unpropertied poor. —Anita L. Allen The experience of black people in the United States of America during slavery and subsequently provides a fruitful point of departure for assessing the normative adequacy of the prevailing philosophical conception of the source and value of rights—a conception that posits the existence of a class of rights that individuals are taken to possess prior to and independently of any form of social recognition. Few philosophers have attended to this general connection between the black experience and philosophical conceptions of rights. Philosopher and law professor Anita Allen is a notable exception.