Every human is unique.

“First off, I concede that ‘a family of a murdered child can only be fully compensated [by the knowledge that] their child is returned to life.’ Consequently, it is possible ‘for the murderer to return [a] 6 year old [child] to the family’ in place of their murdered child, as long as the family thinks that the returned child is their child. “ - Con In principle, this has not answered the philosophical question posed to you. You haven’t described what the family is demanding for compensation and why. The family of any murdered person requires at the least the return of the same murdered person, because they view that person as individually unique; irreplaceable and not interchangeable. Just because a family was tricked into thinking they’ve been compensated for the wrongdoing, doesn’t change the principle of the matter. 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. “…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.” -Con This is not true. Humans appear to have a sort of Hierarchical Temporal Memory system[1] that not only is resistant to change, but only allows superficial changes to occur. 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. 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. When a human is conceived they have no myelin, but as they get older the myelin sheathes that protect the neural pathways in the brain get thicker and thicker. Even before we are born we are beginning to acquire neural pathways that are becoming resistant to change. [2][3] To fundamentally change a person would be to destroy the myelin sheathes and the pathways they coordinate and then to rebuild it from the ground up. If you didn’t kill the person outright, you would certainly destroy the essence of the person. The point is that people are only capable of superficial change, and the essence of what makes a person individually unique is persistent. “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.” –Con 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. “Slavery is morally wrong precisely because humans are not unique. Indeed, it is not the unique fate of certain individuals to be enslaved to their masters; rather, all people are born equal under the law and ought be treated identically, based upon societal choices and actions instead of predestination. This is why people are considered innocent until proven guilty.” – Con This is a complete non-sequitur. 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. Even if all people were identical, having no gender or biological differences, slavery could still exist. It’s not logically or physically impossible. 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. "In fact, one of the reasons slavery was outlawed is that people started to realize that there was no master race and that skin color really was just a superficial characteristic instead of an indicator of intelligence, ability, superiority, or uniqueness.” - Con It is a fact that Europeans and Americans had more wealth, power, and knowledge than their slaves. It is also a fact that humans can be bred to be less intelligent than others. In other words the variance in human DNA permits absolutely the creation of a “master race”. 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. Slavery is impermissible under any circumstance because every human is fundamentally unique due to its sentience. In Latin they call it the “Imago Dei”, the “image of God”. Others have called it the “soul”, “consciousness”, “self awareness”, and “sentience”. 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. This is what makes every human impossible to logically bond into slavery; Because any price put on that slave cannot account for his Self. “If Pro's claim regarding animals of a single type forming hierarchies is correct, why is it that early human societies, which consisted of members more homogeneous than those in modern ones, did not institute slavery but instead practiced primitive communism?” -Con My point was that it is possible that hierarchies form, not that it’s impossible for small communistic societies to form. In other words; if humans are not fundamentally unique then slavery can’t be logically absurd. Especially under some sort of Utilitarian ethic. Eventually the price of the slave would be high enough that it would justify the exchange. 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. TLDR: My opponent hasn’t met my challenge as he hasn’t been able to satisfactorily explain why we treat murder and slavery the way we do without acknowledging that every human is fundamentally unique due to their sentience. 1: https://www.numenta.com... 2: http://www.wisegeek.com... 3: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov...