Yeah, but again, they were slaves. If their opinions were even worth thinking about, they wouldn’t be slaves. If you think of slaves as naturally having the same rights as everyone else, if you think of them as having a right to an opinion, you can’t justify slavery.
So, people who weren’t slaves didn’t care what they thought, so the opinions of slaves weren’t written down, so there’s no easy way to know how slaves felt about slavery. We can know that some slaves weren’t happy about being slaves, from their behavior…from runaways, from slave insurrections, from “shamming” and slacking off, but we can’t know how they felt about the institution as a whole. There very well could have been slaves in colonial and antebellum America who, while they wanted to be free, didn’t see anything wrong with the institution of slavery, just like today, there are poor people who aren’t Communists; people who are poor and unhappy about being poor, who want to be rich, but at the same time, don’t have any desire to destroy the system of rich and poor…they’re perfectly fine with the idea of an underclass, they just don’t want to be in that underclass.
Well you could read the American Slave Narratives to start with.
Well, there were plenty of slaves that rose out of slavery and championed for abolition or assisted in breaking it down. Frederick Douglass is one of them. Harriet Tubman risked life and limb trying to subvert the institution by leading hundreds out of its clutches. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that Nat Turner wasn’t a big fan of it, either. For every one of these famous dissenters, we can safetly assume that there were thousands of others who didn’t acheive the notoriety that they did, but nevertheless felt the same way. They just had no voice.
I really don’t know what kind of evidence you’d need to say that a great many slaves hated being in bondage and hungered for freedom for themselves and their race, but the fact these folks existed isn’t exactly shrouded in mystery. I think your agnosticism is misplaced.
I know people like that existed. But American slavery is weird, and the attitudes of American slaves and slaveholders were weird, because American slavery was so bound up with race and racism. I think that sort of lended itself to a kind of solidarity among American slaves that you didn’t see among slaves in most other societies. In most slave holding societies, the slave is the social and legal inferior of the free man, but that’s merely the result of his legal status. He’s not considered naturally different than his master, and it’s possible that someday he may be freed and either he or his children will be his master’s equal. (There was a system like that in the Americas too…that of indentured servitude.)
But in the case of slavery based on racial categories, things are different. The slave is seen as intrinsically different from his master. It’s not just a difference of degree, but of kind, and so that gap exists and is unbridgable…a slave can be freed, but a black man can’t become white.
We’ve been focusing on American slavery in this thread, and that makes sense from our standpoint, because we’re mostly all American, some of us are the descendants of American slaves, some of us are the descendants of American slaveholders, and slavery in America is the American experience. But the question asked originally isn’t “Can an American slaveholder be a good person”, it’s “Can a slaveholder be a good person”, and while the answer might still be ‘no’, when we look at the question, we need to seperate the act of slavery itself from the racism that was so much a part of American slavery.
Given that we know many of our own conceptions of intelligence have changed in the past, given (for example) that we know IQ tests do not accurately measure intelligence, are we sure our current understanding of intelligence will remain the only understanding?
Didn’t we learn this year that lab mice sing, which we never noticed in decades of studying them? Didn’t an article on dog reasoning come out last week, after ten thousand years of close association? In the last two or three years, I’ve read articles on birds and dolphins using “names”: specific sounds associated with individuals.
It seems to be emerging that intelligence is not an either/or state, but a continuum.
And did not American slaveholders defend their peculiar institution by saying “they are not as intelligent as we are”? I.e., just further down a continuum?
I am not trying to turn this into an animal-rights argument, please bear with me. All I am trying to say (in this post) is that I would be reluctant to make such a sweeping statement about intelligence and about what criteria future thinkers (human or otherwise) will use for moral judgment.
Christianity, at any rate, has nothing against slavery or slaveholders as such. There’s an episode in the NT, I forget which book, where a runaway slave (Christian) seeks shelter with St. Paul; Paul sends the slave back to his master (also Christian) enjoining him to be a good slave and the master to be a kind master. St. Paul, a well-traveled man for his time, probably had never even heard of a society with no chattel slavery (you would have to go as far away as India, where the caste system left no room for it) and could not imagine such a society, and in any case matters of earthly social status were irrelevant to and in the Kingdom of Heaven. “There is no Jew nor Greek, there is no male nor female, there is no bond nor free, for ye are all one in Christ.”
It’s Paul’s letter to Philemon, and that’s not exactly what happens. Paul’s letter says nothing about the slave being a good slave, and he says to Philemon,
So, Paul is sort of hinting here, it seems to me, that maybe Philemon should set Onesimus free, with the whole “have him back as a dear brother”, “welcome him as you would welcome me”, “you owe me”.
Sorry to quote myself, but I wanted to add a nugget of irony. After posting this, I went to lunch. I shared the elevator with one of the developmentally disabled adults who work in another agency that shares our building. He will be building no cuckoo clocks, and like as not, he won’t write patriotic prose…
Is intelligence the only criterion by which his worth should be judged?
It makes sense to limit this to American slavery since Madison (and not some unknown bloke in ancient Rome) inspired the question. As you point out, not all systems of slavery were the same.
But that’s not the OP’s question. The OP asks, bolding mine:
The OP used the original quote…of somebody thinking that Madison was a bad person because he owned slaves, as a jumping off point for a question about slave-holder morality in general. And I think we do the question a disservice if we limit it to American slaveholding, because, as I said before, slaveholding in the Americas was unusual for several reasons:
It was explicitly racial and justified on racist and “scientific” grounds.
It happened on the cusp of the industrial revolution, where increased industrialization was reducing the need for large amounts of manpower to produce goods
The morality of slavery was starting to be openly questioned and debated.
You make an excellent point, which I would like to add to. The argument that people who held slaves could clearly see that the slaves were human and just as intelligent as the slaveholders is kind of beside the point. The point is that the ethic of the time was different. At that time, it was for whatever reason generally considered acceptable to hold other humans in bondage. In our time, it’s generally considered acceptable to use animals for food. Arguments pro or con for either practice aren’t really the issue…the issue is how something can be accepted in one time, and not in another. Personally, I don’t believe animals have the same rights as humans. That doesn’t mean that in another time or place I (and the rest of society) might think differently, based on what the prevailing ethic of that society might be.
The animal rights example is a good one, because I can easily imagine a culture where people might think that it is wrong to kill animals because we have “direct, first-hand empirical evidence” that they can feel pain, for example. We may be able to brush that off now, but some future generation may well ask how we could possibly have been considered a humane society.
Okay. But then the question becomes so broad that it needlessly complicates the discussion. There were certain aspects to American slavery that were absent in other systems. It was more than just “owning” someone.
Your interpretation is like asking “Can a rapist ever be considered a good person?”, and then lumping the 17 year-old guilty of statutorily raping a 15 year old in with the monster who serially rapes little old ladies. Both might be rapists, but they are sufficiently different that they deserve consideration separate from one another.
The problem is that people bend over backwards to protect Jefferson’s good name to the point where they refuse to discuss any of his flaws. For example, before the DNA evidence that showed Jefferson was likely to have fathered slaves with Hemmings there was one Jeffersonian who claimed that he couldn’t have fathered those children because he was too “feminine”. It was better to suggest that this guy couldn’t have a normal sexual relationship with women or that he might have been gay, which is odd considering that as a young man he hit on his neighbor’s wife and he ended up fathering 6 children with his wife, than it was to suggest that he was a hypocrit for having sex with his slave. Yes, people took these kinds of statements seriously and buried their heads in the sand to avoid hearing bad things about their beloved Jefferson.
Philosophically speaking, I’m not really sure how much good one has to do in order to counterbalance the evil that one does. When tallying up the score I’m not so sure Jefferson comes out favorably but then it isn’t my job to lionize or to spit on his grave. As Polybius said, I’ll praise him when he does good and I’ll condemn him when he does wrong whether he is an enemy or a close friend.
I don’t think that anybody’s good or bad can be judged on a single issue of their life or that a life can be so neatly removed from historical context. Can an adulterer be a good person, or can a murderer be? Suppose the murderer killed a Nazi spy- s/he’s still a murderer- or suppose the adulterer was married to a horrible spouse- s/he’s still a murderer. It’s only in broader context that they can be looked at.
By my definition yes, a slaveholder could be a good person, all things considered. I do not consider Thomas Jefferson a good person and it has much to do with his slavery, but I do consider Jane Clemens a good person.
I’ll go with that. He did not separate families, did not believe everything he was told about their intrinsic inferiority, left his estate in such a way that he could emancipate them in his will, and provided land and pensions for those unable to support themselves.
But I still say that 6’8 of mean or not, if he’d ever taken on Chuck Norris he’d have left that fight the Mother of his Country.
The problem with that analogy, though, is that we don’t generally consider the 17 year old who has sex with his 15 year old girlfriend to have committed a particularly evil act…an illegal act, sure…we recognize that it’s statutory rape, but most people would say that the kid just got caught in a really nasty legal trap.
However, most people would agree that slavery, especially chattel slavery, is an evil act. It’s not just that chattel slavery, as practiced in America, was evil, although, with its racial connotation, it might be more evil than some others, but that doesn’t make the slavery practiced in Ancient Rome, or the Arab world, or West Africa, for instance, good. Most people would agree that they still were dehumanizing and evil practices. So, really, the better analogy would be to compare the monster who serially rapes little old ladies to the guy who picks up ladies in bars, and then won’t take no for an answer…has sex with them whether they want to or not. Both people are doing evil things, and just because it’s possible to argue that the granny rapist’s acts are more evil than that of the date rapist’s, the date rapist’s actions still aren’t morally clean.
Certainly–and if this future society is convinced that it’s an atrocity to kill animals, I would fully expect them to judge us harshly. It would be odd to me if they thought that killing animals was evil only in their society, but good in other societies: it would imply a sort of moral relativism that makes me uncomfortable and unhappy.
This discussion may come down to two things:
Do you believe that morality is objective, or do you believe that morality is determined by a society? I’m in the former camp, although I freely admit it’s a matter of faith for me.
Do you believe that it is ever appropriate or useful to view the actions of someone in a different society (separated by distance, culture, or time) through the lens of morality? I believe that, while this is not the only useful way of viewing the actions of others, it’s certainly useful on occasion, both to illustrate and understand moral principles and, when looking at someone who exists currently, to choose a course of action.