Who is recognized as fully human?

A hearing with an empty chair

Imagine a council deciding whether it should govern a neighboring town. One speaker says the townspeople cannot manage their own affairs; another insists that they are capable and deserve protection. Both speak at length. Nobody from the town has been invited.

The second speaker may offer a powerful defense, yet the arrangement leaves a further question unanswered: why does this council get to decide the town’s political future? Hearing a defense of people is different from recognizing their authority to speak and act for themselves.

The case turns on recognition: acknowledging someone as a person whose judgment, rights and claims count, which here includes recognizing a people’s capacity to govern themselves. Their humanity does not depend on a vote. The previous lesson examined the authority to interpret texts; this one examines claims to govern other peoples.

What was being defended at Valladolid?

In 1550–1551, a Spanish inquiry at Valladolid heard arguments about conquest in the Americas. The scholar Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda defended conquest, and the Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas opposed its justifications. It was a dispute within Spanish institutions, not a negotiation between equal delegations from Spain and the peoples it had conquered. [1]

One argument, as the historian of philosophy Bernardo Canteñs reports it, draws on Aristotle’s idea of natural slavery: some people are unable by nature to govern themselves and are therefore properly ruled by others. Sepúlveda applied this alleged incapacity to Indigenous peoples, portraying Spanish domination as beneficial and force as permissible when they resisted. [1]

The crucial step joins two claims: that a people lacks the relevant capacity, and that this gives another people a right to rule it. Even evidence for the first would not by itself prove the second. Sepúlveda also invoked religious wrongdoing, the protection of victims and the spread of Christianity, and these arguments need separate answers: a reply about rational capacity alone would not meet a claim to be rescuing victims. [1]

Las Casas challenges the inference

Las Casas pointed to Indigenous political organization and social life as evidence of reason, and he distinguished different uses of “barbarian”: cultural or religious difference did not establish the radical incapacity invoked in natural-slavery arguments. If “barbarian” first means unfamiliar in custom and then means incapable of reason, the same label is doing two different jobs. [1]

The fault is equivocation: making an inference look sound by sliding between meanings. Las Casas challenged the classification of whole peoples without rejecting every inherited category of natural slavery, so we should credit the full reach of his defense without turning it into a fully modern doctrine of equality.

He also separated condemning a practice from having jurisdiction, the rightful authority to judge or punish it, and he asked whether a war supposedly protecting innocent people would destroy more lives and communities than it saved. An aim described as protective does not justify every means. His defense of peaceful conversion remained Christian in purpose, and it did not require him to accept every religious teaching as true. [1]

The question leaves someone outside

These disagreements had real stakes: Las Casas defended Indigenous freedom and political communities, not merely gentler treatment. Yet an account confined to the two Spaniards still makes European thinkers the chief judges and interpreters of other people’s lives. The inquiry itself ended without an agreed verdict. [1]

Recall the Nahua inquiry in lesson 43 into how to live well amid instability. Questions like that do not begin when a European asks whether their authors possess reason, and no one American tradition can stand for every other. Turning now to an Andean writer in Peru means entering another setting, later than Valladolid, with its own intellectual work and political demands. [2]

A king made to ask questions

Around 1615–1616, Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala composed his New Chronicle and Good Government, addressed to Philip III of Spain. Written in Spanish with Quechua passages and drawings, it combines history, criticism of colonial abuses and proposals for government. Guaman Poma was neither a participant at Valladolid nor a spokesman for all Indigenous peoples. [2]

Our selected passage comes from his imagined dialogue with the king, in Rolena Adorno’s translation. The king asks Ayala for knowledge of Peru so that government can remedy the people’s suffering, and the author announces that he will answer. Adorno reads the arrangement as a reversal: the ruler needs information, and the Andean author claims the standing to instruct him. It is a composed encounter, not a transcript of a royal conversation. [3]

Read beside the conquest debate, the passage changes who does the explaining: someone subjected to colonial rule claims knowledge that the ruler needs. It asks us to notice whose experience can expose a ruler’s ignorance.

Whose account can judge the rulers?

A counter-archive brings neglected testimony and interpretation into view, so that they can challenge the record through which power explains itself. Here the term describes how we read Guaman Poma beside the conquest debate; it does not name a single, unified Indigenous position.

Nor must resistance speak from outside every colonial language or institution. Guaman Poma’s work draws on Christian teaching while contesting Spanish rule and defending Andean government, and his appeal to a king does not erase that challenge. [2]

What we read is still mediated testimony: words that reach us through particular authors, editions and translations. This lesson uses a short passage reproduced in scholarship, with an omission marked in that source, and it cannot establish the argument of the whole chronicle. Taking an author seriously includes asking what this evidence supports, instead of making him the mouthpiece for everything we hope he would say.

Try the hearing

Return to the council. A governor says: “The town has unfamiliar customs, so it cannot govern itself. We recognize its people as human, and our rule will protect them. Their own account would add detail but could not change the question.” Identify a disputed premise and explain why the town’s account could change more than the answer. This exercise is optional.

Read a possible response

The disputed premise is that unfamiliar customs establish an inability to govern. They do not, and calling people human does not show that their political claims are being respected. The governor must justify both the alleged incapacity and the claimed right to rule, and a promise of protection settles neither. The townspeople might question the council’s authority, describe harms its proposal overlooks or explain institutions the governor has misunderstood, so their account could change what needs justification and who can supply relevant knowledge. Listening would not make every claim correct or settle every conflict, but it would open the council’s framing to challenge by the people whose lives it proposes to direct.

Carry this forward

When domination is defended as help, ask what alleged deficiency makes the help necessary, how that deficiency is established and why it would grant anyone authority. Then ask whose account could challenge the question itself. In Testing inherited authority in Ethiopia, we turn to an argument about examining inherited belief, in a text whose disputed authorship raises a further question: what can its surviving evidence establish?

Sources and limits

[1] Bernardo J. Canteñs, “The Rights of the American Indians,” chapter 2 in A Companion to Latin American Philosophy, edited by Susana Nuccetelli, Ofelia Schutte and Otávio Bueno, Wiley-Blackwell, 2013 paperback edition; hardback 2010; ebook ISBN 9781118610565, for the Valladolid inquiry and the arguments of Sepúlveda and Las Casas. The chapter opening before “Vitoria,” the complete “Las Casas” section and the References were read. This is a scholarly reconstruction; the original conquest treatises were not read, and no print pagination was checked.

[2] Luis Fernando Restrepo, “Colonial Thought,” chapter 3 in the same volume, for Guaman Poma’s chronicle and its setting. The complete §III, “Post Conquest Indigenous Perspectives,” was read, especially “Felipe Guamán Poma’s Andean perspective of the world.” Other sections and the works the chapter cites were not independently read.

[3] Guaman Poma, Nueva corónica y buen gobierno, for the imagined dialogue with the king: a selected passage cited at p. 974 of the 1980 edition, translated and discussed by Rolena Adorno in Guaman Poma: Writing and Resistance in Colonial Peru, University of Texas Press, second edition, 2000, Introduction, pp. 7–8 (PDF pages 6–7). The main text of the original Introduction, pp. 3–12, was read; the added introduction and endnotes were not checked. The selected primary passage includes an ellipsis. No complete dialogue or manuscript was read.

All sources were accessed on 17 September 2026. No whole book was read, and no original-language collation was made. No independent specialist or community review, learner testing or measured reading time is claimed. The hearing, town and governor are original examples.