The Theory of Rights of Bartolomé de Las Casas: A dialogue between Las Casas and Locke as forerunners of human rights
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Bartolomé de Las Casas (1484-1566) has been described as a “forerunner” of a distinctly Latin American tradition of human rights, but little attention has been paid to the particular features of his theory of rights which are said to have inaugurated this tradition. To draw out the distinctiveness of his political theory, I offer a novel in-depth comparison between Las Casas and his Anglo-American counterpart from the early-modern period, John Locke. By means of this comparison, I identify several distinguishing features of Las Casas’ theory of rights, such as his alternative to the Lockean understanding of property rights, his emphasis on rights of conscience as foundational for all others, and his concern for truth-telling and documenting injustices to foster a society that respects the rights of individuals. An original argument I advance in my dissertation is that Las Casas’ relationship with the natural law tradition was more complex than has been recognized. I venture that Las Casas was aware of the extent to which he departed from elements of natural law, through the parallels which he invites the reader to make between himself and Christopher Columbus, to whom Las Casas was closely connected. Through his theory of “evangelical rights,” I argue that Las Casas’ pioneered a new kind of law, centred on evangelism, which served as the foundation of his defense of Indigenous peoples.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".