Oppressors invoke their own freedom to justify oppressing others

Evidence

It is the argument which the Southern slaveholders opposed to the abolitionists, and we know that the Yankees were so imbued with the principles of an abstract democracy that they did not grant that they had the right to deny the Southern planters the freedom to own slaves; the Civil War broke out with a completely formal pretext. We smile at such scruples; yet today America still recognizes more or less implicitly that Southern whites have the freedom to lynch negroes. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 91

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: Beauvoir’s 1947 example of the P.R.L. defending exploitation in the name of freedom parallels the reader’s interest in sorting real people into the typology — the ‘serious man’ who fights for property over freedom.