Dude, you have something seriously qrong with your keyboard.

I, personally, would not use b_b’s definition because I believe that, in an absolute sense, self-determination is illusory and rights are, if not quite nonsense on stilts, then at least not worth any more respect than real people are prepared to grant them. From my perspective, what is fundamental to human beings (or any other animals with moderately advanced nervous systems) isn’t actually freedom but consciousness. Our choices are just the end products of the neuro-chemical machinery in which our decision making processes are instantiated, said machinery being constantly adjusted by our interaction with the rest of the world. You “feel” decisions are yours because your consciousness, being necessary for the assimilation of experiences, is aware of what the machinery is doing. Moral constructs like “rights,” “equality, “ etc, at that level of scrutiny, are just heuristics – rules of thumb (like lines of code) that tell a person how to interpret situations not yet encountered.

I don’t assume that the wrongness of slavery is a given – if I did, why would I have entertained the question? I have reasoned, rather, that its wrongness is derivative from one or the other of two more fundamental moral propositions (freedom and equality) and, on some occasions, from a sympathetic association with the suffering of others. Ultimately, it is this latter tendency on which the whole messy, poetic, confused, humane, and sometimes beautiful edifice of moral architecture is grounded.

( --see: “Notes on Morality” http://cadwaladr.blogspot.com/2013/10/notes-on-morality_4.html )