That all living beings have an equal right to freedom is simultaneously a truism and ridiculous nonsense. In one sense, restriction and lack of actualization of one’s potential causes suffering no matter who or where you are. In another sense, the condition that a being defines as “restriction” is highly variable based on the complexity of the species.
Freedom only has meaning in relation to what you would be capable of doing with it. A dog has less potential of freedom than a person, therefore we generally feel less compunction about denying freedom to a dog and keeping them in a house all their lives. Imagine: “Bye-bye, Fito. It’s time for you to go out and make your way in the world.” By the (somewhat socially constructed) reality of dogs’ nature, they simply aren’t as chafed by certain restrictions as we humans are.
So for a horse or a dog, some of what we would call “enslavement” by human standards just doesn’t apply because horses and dogs don’t have the same extent of urges to be free. For them, providing a warm and loving hearth, safety, sufficient physical exercise, and plenty of food tops out their Maslow hierarchy – whereas for a human, these conditions only provide a starting point from which we look upward and yearn for ever more. As beings grow more and more complex, it becomes harder and harder for them to feel self-actualized. There are multiple planes or complexities of freedom and actualization: physical freedom and actualization, emotional freedom, mental freedom, and (probably) so forth.
On the other hand, our standard for humane treatment of others is constantly expanding. Just as there are different planes of freedom, there are different planes of enslavement. We humans have a nasty habit of enslaving the “other” (the Other is a group with whom we cannot perspective-take) for our purposes; all of modern society is intractably rooted in this enslavement. There is no way that Modernity could have occurred without the uncompensated and compulsory input of countless slaves, whether bound by physical chains or economic ones or ideological ones. As we grow, we recognize new, more complex ways in which we have wronged others in our past, and adjust our behavior accordingly. There was a time when genocide was not widely condemned. There was also a time, more recently, when criticizing one’s leader was widely acknowledged as a crime. The Bill of Rights gives us rights that in the distant past would never have been dreamt of and would have been ridiculous to propose. We can assert that these are fundamental and necessary human rights – not just arbitrary decisions and not just founded in the interest of social stability – and still know that it is our evolving society that has given them significance.
I personally think concepts such as net neutrality (the freedom of equal treatment of internet traffic regardless of type or company) and decentralized press are fundamental human rights. Whether society at large decides to agree or not, I am certain that our standards for “fundamental and inviolate human rights” will continue to change.
Broadening experiences, such as education, tend to stretch people’s identities and thus expand 1) their requirements for self-actualization, 2) the types of freedom they care about, and 3) the types of restrictions / lacks of freedom which they can perceive and will resent. You need to be aware of political happenings and understand how they affect you and others in order to care about corruption. Areas with lower education levels tend to exhibit this attitude, in my experience: in Nicaragua, there is minimal open anger or resentment at presidential elections that were apparently heavily tweaked, and those people who do express resentment tend to be the university students and the educated elite.
