Christopher Brown

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1,098 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jan 2026 last heard 20 Jan

Christopher Brown’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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80,000 Hours Podcast · #145 Classic episode – Christopher Brown on why slavery abolition wasn't inevitable · 20 Jan 2026 podcast

Because the notion of natural rights had been around for a while.

It is not a new creature of the 18th century and had not been thought to be extended by European thinkers to enslaved Africans in the Americas.

Now, again, I want to say enslaved Africans in the Americas, the millions of men, women, and children held in bondage, if it had been possible,

to take a poll, I'm sure they would have said some version of, what is being done to me is a violation of my natural rights, or my God-given rights, or my sacred rights, or a violation of, you know, of what the ancestors bequeathed to us, or my rights as a member of the, as a subject of the King of Congo, any number of reasons, right?

So,

Natural rights as an ideology was there.

You're right.

It was kind of on the shelf in this sense.

And it's because natural rights does not lead naturally into anti-slavery thought and action that I'm skeptical of notions that in the end, at some point, some way, natural rights would have led to anti-slavery movements.

For hundreds of years, it had not done so.

And you can even go back further, because as I was saying before, late Roman thought and early medieval legal thought regarded slavery as against nature, as against man's nature.

So, you know, again, the moral insight, the legal insight is not in itself particularly new in the late 18th century.

It's the uses to which it is getting put.

And the uses are importantly political uses.

that are acquiring great significance in a new way.

So I really think that it's not so much the idea of natural rights or natural rights ideology as the new ways to which those ideas are being mobilized in this period that's really crucial for our subject.

Yeah, I think about this all the time.

And honestly, Rob, a lot of my work on this subject

really begins from reflecting on our moral experience in kind of everyday life.

You know, I grew up at a time in the United States in the immediate aftermath of the civil rights movement, where there was a lot of discussion about what will it take to get another movement, you know, going to sort of push the next level of equality.

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