Contract: The Case Against the Human Rental Contract Based on Inalienability

The intellectual treatment of slavery or lifetime servitude is typically dumbed-down to the question of coercion versus consent. But from Antiquity, there have been intellectual defenses of contractual slavery that continue to this day. Hence the Abolitionist Movement had to dig deeper than just promote consent over coercion. The deeper tradition of rights that are inalienable even with consent (Spinoza’s phrase) descends from the Reformation principle of the inalienability of conscience that was secularized in the Enlightenment. In this chapter, this intellectual history of contractual slavery and the abolitionist counterarguments based on inalienable rights are recovered in a modern form and applied against the short-term voluntary contract to rent oneself out in the employment relation. The basic idea is that the responsible actions of a person (the employee) cannot in fact be given up and transferred to another person (the employer) like one can the services of a car or apartment when those things are rented out—so the contract to rent a human being is inherently invalid. There seem to be many ways to mis-understand (or rhetorically trivialize) the notion of inalienable rights, so one subchapter is devoted to anticipating and clarifying those misunderstanding.