1 Vitoria on anomalous rights

Vitoria poses at the beginning of this excerpt the question whether American Indians, “before the arrival of the Spaniards, had true dominion,” that is, let’s just say, had what should be recognized as legal and/or political rights.

Vitoria claims there are four possible grounds for dismissing someone’s precedent legal or political rights:

that they are sinners,
that they are unbelievers,
that they are madmen, and
that they are ‘insensate’.

And his question for each of these possible grounds is:

whether it is a legitimate grounds for denying someone’s ‘dominion’ (political and/or legal rights), and
if it is, whether it applies to the American Indians.

I want to focus especially on §§20–24 here, so let me just make a few quick notes on other parts of the question:

In §6, he argues that “mortal sin is no impediment to the civil right of ownership, nor to true dominion.” So much for that first ground.
In §§7–18, he argues that “It is no impediment for a man to be a true master, that he is an unbeliever,” and he appeals to an argument from Aquinas, “that unbelief does not cancel either natural or human law, but all forms of dominion (dominio.) derive from natural or human law; therefore they cannot be annulled by lack of faith.” He then applies this reasoning to the American Indians, saying that “the barbarians are not impeded from being true masters, publicly and privately, either by mortal sin in general or by the particular sin of unbelief. Nor can Christians use either of these arguments to support their title to dispossess the barbarians of their goods and lands” (§19). So much for the second ground.

Question 1, Article 4, deals with the third possible grounds. Unlike the first two, Vitoria accepts that it is a legitimate basis for rejecting dominion. See pp. 247–8.

Now, at this point, you might be thinking: Well, then, this is going to be his argument for denying dominion of indigenous Americans. But:

The following two Articles ask whether children and madmen have dominion. Note the identical reasoning in the two passages on p. 249.

And now see the argument on p. 250, and in fact see all of the highlighted material to p. 251 here.