Every human is unique.

"Consider if a judge had ordered me to compensate you to the order of 100 ounces of gold for property I had stolen. You were happy with this settlement and placed the gold in your safety deposit box, thinking you were that much richer. You happen to die shortly thereafter and it is found out that the gold was fake. You were not compensated for your loss even though you felt like you were; You were deceived, nothing more. " Actually, you were compensated because what God knows has absolutely no impact on your compensation. Even if the gold is fake, if no one else in society recognizes that it is fake and everyone accepts your gold, then you have been compensated. Otherwise, no one could ever be compensated, since as far as humanity is concerned, God might have tampered with the compensation. Compensation is based solely upon the person doing the compensating, the person being compensated, and the rest of human society. Facts known only to God have no impact upon the compensation. Thus, if God tricks all of humanity "into thinking [the family has] been compensated for the wrongdoing," humanity will consider them compensated and consequently they are compensated according to the "moral and legal structures that we take for granted. " That they may not philosophically be compensated has no relevance to this debate, which is centered around the practical, societal concept of compensation. "You haven't described what the family is demanding for compensation and why. " The family demands as compensation the following: a person that is fairly similar to the person that has been lost. This person must be similar enough that it is conceivable for the latter to have become the former. Consequently, all of society may consider the returned person to be the same as the lost one. "Humans appear to have a sort of Hierarchical Temporal Memory system that not only is resistant to change, but only allows superficial changes to occur. " This is true; however, it does not invalidate my statement that "it possible for people to change in almost every way imaginable, deliberately or unconsciously, as to resemble others and be completely different from the way they were before" because resemblance is based upon superficial characteristics and behaviors. "Our brains take in information about our surroundings and make prediction based on what was true in the past, and filters out the noise". It takes a tremendous amount of information over many many years for people to establish this ability. " Again, although this is true, it is also irrelevant since it is impossible to read people's minds or determine what they are thinking. "What this means is that to really fundamentally change the brain of a human would be to utterly destroy their ability to comprehend the world around them and then to rebuild it from the ground up. " The human brain does not have to be fundamentally changed; society's perception of the person, which is NOT based upon what they are thinking or how they are processing information, must be changed. "The essence of what makes a person individually unique is persistent. " This is the major flaw in Pro's argument: he implicitly assumes that humans can detect this essence. However, I argue that only God can detect it and have backed up my opinion with a source about Frederic Bourdin (. http://en.wikipedia.org...). If only God can detect it, then that it exists is irrelevant when considering practical matters such as justice and compensation. ---------- Con: "Indeed, the punishment for kidnapping a person and then releasing them in a safe place is often less than that of some crimes against other people's property, [such] as copyright infringement. " Pro: "Kidnapping is fundamentally different than murder because the person can be returned. The severity of punishment for kidnapping versus copyright infringement is irrelevant because it doesn't address an attack on the individuality of a person like slavery or murder. " Response: I was assuming that the person kidnapped (Nicholas Barclay) was murdered and someone else (Frederic Bourdin) was released in his place, in which case an attack on the individuality of a person would occur and yet society would not care about it since his family was compensated and everyone was satisfied with the outcome. ---------- "If people are unique, it doesn't mean that they are predestined for anything, nor that they can't be afforded the same fundamental freedoms (negative rights), nor that justice shouldn't be blind. " The inverse, however, is true: if people are not unique, then it does mean that they are not predestined for anything, that they are afforded the same fundamental freedoms (negative rights), and that justice is blind. "Even if all people were identical, having no gender or biological differences, slavery could still exist. It's not logically or physically impossible. " Empirically, this is not supported. Hypotheticals do not matter in a debate about the practical effects of the uniqueness of every human. What is important is that history has demonstrated that slavery was brought about by the presence of unique characteristics in certain groups of people (see . http://en.wikipedia.org...). So, even though it might still be possible for slavery to occur, history has shown that it is a lot less likely in a homogeneous society than in one that glorifies individuality and uniqueness. "You could just make an axiomatic statement that slavery is wrong because we're similar to one another, but that's not apparently any more superior than the argument that slavery is fine because the bible condones it, like Jefferson Davis argued. " Correction: Jefferson Davis argued that slavery against African Americans, a distinct class of people, is fine because of the bible. He did not support enslaving Caucasians or everyone else part of the homogeneous society at the time. This is why slaves were imported from Africa and not taken out of Europe. "So if that is your reason for opposing slavery, I wonder if you would still oppose it if the conditions that inform that position were made untrue. " I (and most people) would not and do not oppose "slavery" between superior and inferior beings. For example, the relationship between a man and his pet dog is not unlike the one between a master and a slave. The only real difference is that since humans are superior to pets, it is not called slavery per se. "every human is fundamentally unique due to its sentience" This is what makes humans superior to animals. If a master race was created that was infinitely more "sentient" than humans, then it would be superior to humans. "Whatever you want to call it, this fundamental experience of reality sets every individual human apart from the rest. It cannot be replicated, replaced, or exchanged in an open market. " Actually, it can be replicated (see . http://en.wikipedia.org...). "In fact if the price offered for the person were high enough, say 1 billion dollars for some average shmuck, paid to the family, it seems that Utilitarianism would demand that such a transaction take place. That it would be immoral for the man to turn that kind of money down when he'll never provide that much for his family. " Some people would accept the transaction. Do you think they are all immoral? It's not slavery if it's voluntary. .. in this case, it would be more like indentured servitude and consequently could still be considered moral. TL;DR Although humans may be fundamentally unique, society is unable to appreciate or handle their uniqueness and consequently, "our moral and legal structures that we take for granted" function based off of the assumption that all humans are not unique. We too do not "treat every human as unique" but instead identify and interact with them based upon their behaviors and superficial characteristics (see . http://en.wikipedia.org...).