The point pizzabrat is obviously trying to make is that your “morality is relative” defense of slaveowners by nature dismisses the views of the slaves on being slaves. You can only honestly say that society believed that slavery is good, if you include the slaves opinion as well, since they are part of society. You are simply echoing the self justifications of the slaveowners, and you yourself are treating the slaves as subhuman.
I seriously doubt that many slaves have felt that he or she should be a slave ( especially without systematic abuse and humiliation to break them ), or that a significant number of free people have wanted to be slaves themselves. So at the very best slaveowners are guilty of hypocrisy; they feel slavery is just, as long as it isn’t practiced on THEM. As for me, I believe that anyone who owns slaves is evil, and if the societies of the past mostly held slaves, that just means that THEY were evil. The “different standards apply” arguement assumes that moral progress doesn’t exist, which I don’t believe. We are not just different than past societies; we are morally superior. Slavery is bad now, it was bad a thousand years ago, and it’ll be bad a thousand years in the future.
No, not really. During the Founding era, most people agreed that slavery was immoral but that it would be more immoral to upset society’s foundations by getting rid of it overnight. Jefferson and his ilk wanted a gradual ending of it since they saw the obvious conflict between “all men are created equal” and the institution of slavery.
However, the generation after that (such as Calhoun and his ilk) saw slavery as a positive good. Far from thinking it was a necessary evil such as Jefferson did, they saw it as good for both slaves and slave owners. They did not think they were wrong; they thought that abolitionists and those opposed to slavery were fighting against the natural order of things.
We can look back and say that they were wrong, clearly. But to say they knew it was wrong ignores the basic facts about slavery in the U.S.
To the OP, can a slaveowner be a good person. Of course. Is owning a slave wrong? Sure, but so are a lot of things. Since every one of us does immoral things every day, does that mean we are all bad people? Perhaps in the strictest sense of the term, but I don’t think so for the purposes of this debate. People do both good and bad. So if we are going to condemn all slave owners throughout history as evil merely because they owned slaves, then we might as well say that everyone was a bad person.
I hate to break it to you guys but slavery not being an institution - a normal part of everyday life - is a thoroughly modern concept. Slavery goes back to the dawn of recorded history. That doesn’t make it right or make it wrong; it makes modern times different and better.
For me it depends on how you define good. If you mean “exhibiting a Christ- or Bhudda-like sinlessness”, then no. But if you mean “having given the world an important contribution in science, political thought, or whatever, and having lived decently according to the lights of his time”, I’d say yes.
Of course, that could be used to defend Mengele if any of his gruesome experiments had yielded up, say, a cancer cure. And before anyone whines about Godwin, you can’t get around the fact that in any attempt to use “well, THEY thought it was moral” to excuse people’s behavior, the Nazis thought they were moral.
I don’t see why we shouldn’t use the standards of today to judge people in the past. Yes, people were brought up to believe that system was a good one. But that’s very close to saying that people are inevitably slaves to their upbringing, and I don’t believe that’s so. Also, it seems to almost denigrate those who actually changed the system; they were brought up believing slavery wasn’t bad too. Or their parents were. Saying that slaveowners were good (or at least not bad) by the standards of the time means we can’t say that those who led the charge to ban it were significantly better.
But it’s still more complicated than that. What about someone who was raised to believe that totally brutal evil worst-case chattel slavery was right, and said “hey, what I was taught was wrong”, and lobbied for many reforms to treat slaves more humanely, give them some rights, etc., but still not actually emancipate them. Can we not recognize the “goodness” of that action?
Good and bad are subjective terms. You can only use your own moral purpose to declare what is good or bad in your opinion. Was it wrong of the founding fathers to own slaves? Of course. Did they accomplish many other good deeds? Yes. They were what they were and a product of their time.
Not to an extent. If we say that slaveowners aren’t bad because they’re just a product of their times, and the conditions they kept slaves in were also a social norm and so they can’t be blamed; why is someone who improved those conditions good?
The problem is taking two different evaluations of what’s good and bad. One is to say that people are good or bad by their thoughts; that slaveowners did bad actions, but that they weren’t necessarily bad people because they were honestly following what they thought was normal. And someone could hold that opinion, though i’d disagree with it. But then you look at the slaves themselves, and the only way you can say that their lives were bad is to look at those actions and not just the thoughts behind them. Slavery is bad because of the conditions people are forced to live under.
You can’t say that slaveowners weren’t that bad because badness is a result of thoughts and context, and then say that anti-slavery folks were good because badness is a result of actions taken. It’s one or the other, or both. You can’t apply them seperately.
I disagree. In our current society, by our current norms, a good person will neither be a rapist nor a rapist-murderer.
In a society of rapist-murderers, the “average” person, the “normal” person, the “decent” person, will be a rapist-murderer. The true saint will be neither. And someone who has a reasonable amount of the kind of moral clarity and strength of character that is necessary to throw off what society teaches you, that person will propose social change to become a society of just rapists, not rapist-murderers. THAT person is someone I will happily call “good”.
The question becomes, ‘was there a single good man prior to the Enlightenment?’
Apparently not, if you hold an absolutist view. Jesus talked about keeping slaves, after all.
Even if the Nazis did think they were behaving morally, most of the world didn’t. Unfortunately most of the world did look the other way, which is admittedly a form of condonement, until they were themselves attacked. However, I don’t see how that gets Mengele a pass.
Well, oftentimes people who improve such conditions are not thought of as merely “good,” but in fact, extraordinary in their goodness, and indeed sometimes visionaries. Of course, this is what is difficult for us to resolve in terms of the founding fathers, because we consider them to be visionaries in the way that they perceived the right of man to be free, and yet they didn’t extend this to all men. It’s a disconnect that I think can never fully be understood or accepted in our time. Although slavery has always existed and still exists today, I think it’s not unreasonable for us to think that the founders should have acted in a way contrary to the accepted standard of the time, given that they drafted documents like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
Since I despise Jesus, that’s not much of an argument for me. I’m perfectly comfortable with saying that all or nearly all past societies were evil, and ours is still fairly evil. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were good individuals in the past, but not Jesus.
Because the society he was a part of did approve of his behavior. And if you buy the idea that morality is relative to one’s society, then Mengele - and the entire Holocaust - can be written off as “moral by their culture.” This is one of the problems with moral relativism. It sounds good with minor stuff like nudity taboos, but doesn’t hold up when applied to serious matters, like genocide or torture.