Dred Scott

For today, I think I will begin to discuss the kinds of values and laws that a well-designed global society of the future might be built around.

But we first need to remind ourselves that values do underlie our laws and our laws do enable and shape our way of life. It was in the days when some human beings were not valued as truly human that laws could find a man like Dred Scott to be morally not considerable, not qualified to be a citizen, and devoid of rights in all US courts. The decision was reached in 1857 and was aimed, according to the Supreme Court justices who wrote it, at settling the slavery question once and for all. It had no such effect. The abolitionists in all states, but mostly in the North, became even more vocal and more disenchanted with the whole US system. The decision was, indirectly, one of the factors that contributed to the start of the US Civil War. It comes at the top of the list for nearly all historians of the worst Supreme Court decisions ever. (Wikipedia link below.)

Today we feel that it is so egregiously wrong that we find it difficult to believe anyone at the time could reason so illogically as to tell a man who could learn how to sue for his freedom in the courts, find a lawyer, and help to organize his own case that he was not morally considerable. But that is what the Supreme Court justices found. The reasons they gave are tangled and complicated, but in the end they are a gobbledygook amalgam that only manages to reach a glaring injustice. The majority of people even in those times could see this was so. Many just were tired of fuss and wanted the whole slavery question to go away. Thankfully, some were determined that this one particular form of madness, that had been endured from the time of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, had to be stopped. They hung in there, and eventually, after much pain, it was.

How this example connects to my particular philosophical view is via the consideration of what I would have done if I had been alive in those times. And even what I would have done if I had lived in the South versus what I would have done if I had lived in Massachusetts or Illinois.

It is fashionable today to say that if we had grown up in those states and times, any of us would have gone along with the status quo. My hope and belief is that a sense of decency coming from the core of each of us eventually can't stand to look at what is simply wrong. There certainly were people in those times who became abolitionists even though they had been raised in slave-owning families. I believe I would have been one of the abolitionists.

The largest point I wish to make today then is this: the most important duty that any of us has is to his or her own soul. Or conscience, if you like.

What's fashionable, what the public thinks, and what the received opinions are have all been wrong before, and will be again. In the end, I must answer to my conscience. You have to answer to yours.

I aim to die believing fully that I did my best to be decent, even when that was the least easy option before me.

In our time, this is probably going to mean that we have to give up many comforts so that we stop polluting this planet, in my humble opinion anyway.

I drive a hybrid, minimal miles. My wife and I compost and re-cycle almost all of our garbage. I live in a geo-thermal townhouse complex. But I know I am going to have to do more. We can't go on as we have been for so long.

Right is what it is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dred_Scott