Subjectivist property-rights theory made slavery morally defensible.

Evidence

Medieval jurists talked about “property rights” in a state of nature, but they tended to do so in terms of claims, a notion that implied that every right entailed a reciprocal duty in accordance with objective (because divinely given) criteria. In the later Middle Ages, however, the idea was introduced that a property right was any right that could be held against all other men, and that could be freely transferred by its possessor. In the sixteenth century there developed a debate between those for whom liberty itself was property (something owned ), and therefore alienable in the same way and under the same terms as any other property; and those (like the Dominicans, for whom the welfare of humans rather than their essential liberty was what mattered) who held that liberty was not in that sense a property. In this way, a theory of rights sanctioned practices—such as slavery—that an antisubjectivist theory disallowed. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 629

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the critique of liberal rights discourse in The Reluctant Fundamentalist and to broader debates about how property logic extends to persons. — connects to: Legal fictions once classified slaves as real estate and corporations as persons. — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 95
• DEEPTHINKING: Points to a deep historical contingency: modern subjectivist rights theory is the thing that sanctioned slavery, not what abolished it—an inversion that overturns the common Whig narrative.