Do the blind have no reason to respect the rights of other human beings?
If I learn how to pronounce your name in Latin do I gain the right to kill you?
Thomas Jefferson , no less, searched his mind dilligently for justifacations of slavery, racial distinctions that could be magnified into differences irreconcileable with the respect due a citizen.
I don't really know what you look like , but if you look diffrent enough, if you need diffrent things, if you smell funny to me, if you like strange food, can I discount your humanity by how diffrent your humanity is from mine?
I don't know if you are large or small, is the one of us that is larger more human for being a more massive human?
I see a very close parrellel bewtween the intelectualls who needed intelectual justifacations for denying the human rights of other races in the 18th century and people who today try to intellectualise diffrences between "born" and "pre-born" as reasons to deny the humanity of a person who if left to develop another hour would be a person fully.
It is not rational, it is an attempt to clothe in rationality an irrational thing that seems necessacery.
I think that Thomas Jefferson realised the dissonance , but endured it well enough to operate his plantation.
This is exactly what we are looking at today , but too near to see.