Who was left outside the language of rights?

Who counts as everyone?

Imagine a town that displays a charter promising liberty to everyone. Its council says that women need husbands to judge public matters for them, and merchants arriving at its harbor claim a legal right to own the people they have bought. The charter’s generous words leave both arrangements undisturbed.

A universal claim applies to everyone within its stated scope. When liberty is said to belong to human beings, excluding some human beings demands an explanation. Who has quietly been removed from “everyone”?

Mary Wollstonecraft and Ottobah Cugoano make that question central to political argument. Their subjects and circumstances differ, but both ask whether the principles used to defend freedom can justify the institutions around them, and their challenges reach into education, property and the authority to speak for others.

Learning to judge

In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft asks why men who demand the freedom to judge their own happiness should claim the exclusive right to judge women’s. If women share the capacity for reason, a man’s confidence that he knows what is best cannot settle the matter. [1]

Reason here means the ability to examine the grounds for belief and action, and it needs cultivation. A girl taught to please, to obey and to depend on male approval gets little practice in deciding what she has reason to do. Her apparent weakness is then offered as evidence that dependence suits her nature.

The defense of dependence thus draws its evidence from the very arrangements it defends. A life organized to leave a capacity undeveloped cannot, by itself, show that the person lacks it by nature.

Freedom needs institutions

For Wollstonecraft, virtue means more than outwardly correct behavior: a person must understand why an action is right and act from that understanding. She finds this demand for rational independence in Rousseau’s account of men, extends it to women and asks why it should stop at the boundary between the sexes. [1]

Independence also needs practical support. She argues for opportunities to earn a living, individual protection under civil law and a share in political representation, because depending on a husband’s generosity for subsistence makes independence fragile. She also proposes publicly supported schools in which girls and boys learn together.

Her account has important limits. Motherhood remains central to her picture of women’s duties, and her school plan separates later education according to expected work, ability and wealth. We can recognize the force of her challenge without treating her institutions as a completed plan for equality.

Cugoano claims the right to argue

Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments describes his kidnapping in Africa, his enslavement in Grenada and how he later gained liberty and literacy in England. The trade had treated him as merchandise; now he calls its defenders to account. [2]

He also confronts the claim that an African cannot possess knowledge or moral judgment. If those who buy and sell people boast of their superior understanding, their conduct puts that boast in question, and the person classified as incapable becomes the critic of those doing the classifying.

Cugoano appeals to a God who grants human beings an equal natural right to liberty. The Christian duty to treat others as one would wish to be treated turns the trade into an accusation against societies that call themselves Christian. Religious reasoning supplies part of his challenge to domination; it is not simply a tradition he leaves behind.

Can a purchase make ownership right?

Suppose a buyer says, “I paid for this person, so I own them.” Cugoano compares the claim to buying stolen goods: a payment between two parties cannot give the buyer a right that the seller never possessed, and permission from a legislature cannot supply that missing right. Laws made by enslavers can give orderly form to robbery. [2]

His comparison does not reduce a human being to an object. It exposes an inconsistency in people who defend property while taking from others both their possessions and their freedom. He asks Europeans to consider how they would judge someone who carried off their own families. A person’s value exceeds that of their goods.

Equal standing means that each person’s freedom and interests make claims on how others may treat them. It changes what property law may protect: a claimed investment cannot settle whether one person may possess another.

What abolition demands

Abolition means ending the institution of slavery. For Cugoano, kinder treatment cannot resolve the wrong of holding people in involuntary servitude. He demands action against the trade and duties of assistance to the oppressed, including duties that reach beyond one’s own nation. The losses that ending a profitable practice might cause do not make the practice just. [2]

Yet his proposals contain a tension. He calls for emancipation without delay, then outlines a transition in which freedom depends on time served, Christian instruction and conduct. He also allows bondage as a punishment for serious crimes. His attack on racial slavery therefore leaves us with a further question: how can conditions on emancipation be reconciled with the equal right he has defended?

Wollstonecraft’s criticism of women’s dependence and Cugoano’s argument against slavery concern distinct forms of subjection. Reading them together helps us ask whether the institutions that promise rights also create the conditions used to deny those rights. Inclusion may then require changing those institutions, and with them the concepts of education, citizenship and ownership they rely on.

Try the claim of ownership

Imagine a merchant who says, “I bought these people lawfully. Releasing them would ruin my business. I will promise to treat them well instead.” Reconstruct Cugoano’s objection to this defense. This exercise is optional.

Read a possible response

On Cugoano’s argument, each part of the defense fails. Purchase cannot establish a right to possess someone, because the seller had no such right to transfer; a law authorizing the sale must itself be judged; and profit cannot supply the missing justification. Better treatment might reduce suffering while leaving the claimed ownership intact, so the objection targets the institution, not only the owner’s conduct within it. A faithful reconstruction should add that Cugoano’s own text proposes a transition to freedom with conditions attached, which complicates his general demand.

Looking back: knowledge and authority

This module has asked what supports our claims to know and our claims to govern. Two concepts connect those inquiries. From Hume, in Habit, causation and the self, comes induction: the step from observed cases to cases we have not observed. Repeated experience can guide us without proving that things must remain the same. From Rousseau, in Freedom, inequality and a common will, comes the general will: the common interest citizens share, which a sum of private wishes can miss. A winning vote can settle a decision without proving that it serves the common good.

Wollstonecraft and Cugoano sharpen the political stakes. Who was allowed to develop judgment, and who counted among the people whose interests mattered? The answers shape both the evidence a society accepts and the authority it recognizes.

An optional checkpoint: the council school

Imagine that only boys have attended the town’s public school. Its council says, “Only men have shown the learning needed to govern. Experience proves that this must remain so.” The men on the council then vote unanimously to keep excluding women, declaring that their agreement expresses the general will.

Use induction and the general will to examine these claims. Then say what question remains open, and what the kind of evidence we have been reading cannot show. You can continue without answering or choosing a philosophical position.

Read a checkpoint response

The council moves from an observed pattern to a claim about what must always happen. Hume’s problem of induction exposes the gap: past observations do not demonstrate that future cases must repeat them. Here there is also a specific reason to distrust the evidence, because the town withheld the very education whose results it now measures, and opening the school would change the conditions. None of this proves in advance what everyone will achieve, but it defeats the council’s claim to have established a necessary limit.

The general will is directed toward the common interest, and agreement among the people already permitted to vote does not guarantee it. A council cannot show that it serves everyone by excluding potential objectors and counting the votes that remain. This is where the module’s two questions, about justified knowledge and legitimate authority, meet: we must examine both the inference and the terms on which a decision claims to speak for others.

The council’s errors still leave a real question open: how should a society repair unequal opportunities while deciding what knowledge particular public responsibilities require? A promise of equal treatment does not settle the details. And remember what kind of evidence we have been reading. These selected philosophical texts present arguments and proposals, not a survey of actual schools, councils or the experiences of all excluded people. They help us criticize the invented council’s reasoning, but they do not tell us that every historical institution worked this way.

Carry this forward

Universal language places demands on the people who use it. Recognizing a right can expose a wrong while leaving hard questions about how to repair it. The next module opens with What must experience already involve?, which returns to knowledge and asks how we can understand a world at all.

Sources and limits

[1] Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1792; Project Gutenberg eBook 3420, transcription updated 2021, for reason, education, work, representation and domestic duties. Read:

• Dedication: complete.
• Chapter 2: from its opening through the paragraph beginning “Let us examine this question”.
• Chapter 9: from “But, to have done with these episodical observations” to its end.
• Chapter 12: from “Were boys and girls permitted” through “The young people of superior abilities,” including the displayed footnote.

The underlying print edition was not established, and Rousseau’s Émile was not read separately.

[2] Ottobah Cugoano, Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, London, 1787; Oxford Text Archive, ECCO Text Creation Partnership transcription K046227.000, for the argument against slavery and its qualified transition. Read pp. 3–6, 12–14, 71–74, 112–116, 120–122 and 128–133. Page numbers follow the transcription; original page images were not compared.

• Robbery and racial exclusion: pp. 4–5.
• Purchase and duties to help: pp. 113–115.
• The demand for abolition: pp. 120–122.
• The qualified transition: pp. 130–132.

His polemical accounts of other peoples and religions are not adopted here as historical findings.

Both works were written in English; no translation was used. Sources accessed 18 September 2026. Neither whole book was read. The checkpoint reuses the selected Hume and Rousseau accounts linked above. The charter, merchant and school cases are original teaching material. No independent scholarly review or learner testing is claimed.