They are defined as such. You said I “insist” they are, with emphasis, which is pretty different than knowing the fact of the matter. I would stop calling them property in an instant if the relevant laws changed.
But even if we completely reduce moral thinking to efficiency thinking, we still have a big distinction between the moral thinking and something like economics. The question I asked is quite relevant: if new models, widely accepted as factual and predictive, showed the slavery was of economic benefit, would we agree that it was okay?
I’ve never talked with someone who was so stubborn about refusing to say slavery was wrong, but you answered the question anyway. If a model showed that slavery was efficient, you would reject the model.
To accept the idea of efficiency as the basis for morality we must accept that this is an underlying whether-we-know-it-or-not basis for morality, not a stated one. Most moral evolutions have happened without any direct appeal to efficiency, but efficiency tirelessly worked away anyway. The advantage of this kind of evolution - which is basically a market in this way of thinking - is precisely that it does not require (or allow) kings or priests to step in and say this or that. Sure, an individual moral pronouncement may come from a person of authority, but that’s just the system working the way it works. (Interestingly enough, it works this way despite the fact that the moral innovators aren’t paid huge heaps of money)
And this is why it makes sense not to accept an economic model that says that slavery is sensible. We can trust our better judgment because it is not really our judgment, it is the work of thousands of years of evolution of moral thinking, guided by survival of the fittest. By saying that you would not believe an economic model that showed slavery was efficient, and by suggesting that efficiency is the basis of morality, the only possibly conclusion is that you agree that in some cases, we should trust moral thinking over economic thinking.
So basically, you are more sure that slavery is inefficient (wrong) than you would be of any economic model (no matter how well explained or documented) that showed that it was efficient. This is not the same thing as a physicist who won’t believe in dark energy. It makes a lot of sense to question an economic model based on a moral objection to its predictions. For the most part ,those who have lived by “You can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs” have broken a huge number of eggs and ended up with no omelettes to show for it.
In order to sufficiently reduce moral thinking to efficiency thinking, we have to accept that moral thinking has developed its own heuristics for determining efficiency and that sometimes it will get it right when efficiency thinking itself gets it wrong. Since those heuristics of moral thinking are emergent from a process that existed long before contemporary economic models, they aren’t terribly explainable through those models.
If all this is true, though, that means that the moral judgments of everyday people come out of this great moral/efficiency think tank - a think tank that is far better at making these judgments then some egg heads in the same way that the market was better at pricing goods than the soviet central planners. Basically it is better to trust some kind of average of public moral thought to find an efficient way to organize society than it is to trust economists - the kings and priests in this case.
Reductionism, it turns out, is largely pointless, and works both ways.
