Morality questions (from a slave's point of view)

Great Debates
21

The simple answer is that being forced into slavery does not change the ethical status of my actions. I do not recognize the morality or legality of my enslavement, my actions are therefore morally exactly the same as a free person’s actions. I have the exact same natural rights as any other person, regardless of what the slaveholder or the slaveholder’s society claims.

I should therefore treat the slaveholder, the slaveholder’s agents, and the slaveholder’s family just as I would any other person. That is, I can ethically only respond to their actions or threatened actions. I can’t kill a baby just because the baby might grow up to be a slaveholder. I can’t kill someone who doesn’t threaten me with deadly force. In some slaveholding situations I can imagine that every adult member of the slaveholding class and every one of their agents is prepared to threaten me with deadly force at any time, in those cases it would be ethical to use deadly force in return. Under other slave regimes my use of deadly force would be justified in some particular cases and unjustified in other cases.

The fact that I am judged a slave by some people has no bearing on whether my actions are ethical or not. In most cases my ethical relationship to a person who calls himself my owner would be identical to my relationship with a mugger who holds me at gunpoint. I can use deadly force against a mugger in certain circumstances but not in others, the same circumstances would apply to a mugger who called himself my owner and imagined a more long-term mugging. I act to protect myself, if I can protect myself without deadly violence I have an obligation to do so. I also have a lesser obligation to prevent the mugger from mugging other people in the future, just as I have the right to protect myself I also have the right to protect others. But my use of force must be proportionate to the threat offered by the mugger.

Membership in a “class” of slaveholders is irrelevant. Such classes are human-created fictions. Every person is simply a person, their membership in a human-created class is irrelevant, what matters is their actions. If that person engages in unethical actions to you or others your responses to those actions change. But you are not allowed to kill someone merely because he pretends to be your owner, what makes your self-defense ethical or not is whether he threatens you with deadly force.

22

I don’t think a BDSM kink counts as real slavery. In any case, that person decided to enter into that relationship, which can’t be said of American slaves. They’re also free to leave whenever they want; their “slavery” isn’t protected by law. As for the children, yeah someone might prefer slavery over something happening to their children, but they wouldn’t choose it outright.

23

Thus, if you cannot escape without killing your captor, you are obligated to continue as his slave? Doesn’t work for me.

24

I agree with the points you’re making now, which is why I said that your first point was too broadly made.

25

Well, it depends on circumstances. If I can escape without killing my captor, I have an obligation to do so, unless I reasonably believe that puts other people at risk of his threats of deadly force. Same situation as a lunatic running around with a gun…if I reasonably believe other people are at risk I can ethically use deadly force to stop him even if I am not directly threatened other people are. However, if others are not threatened, and I am not threatened, I have no ethical right to use deadly force.

If I was in a situation where I could escape only through the use of deadly force I could only ethically do so under some circumstances. Take for instance if I were wrongfully convicted of a crime. I don’t believe I could ethically use deadly force against a guard to escape even if that were the only way I could escape. Even further, I don’t think I would have an ethical right to attempt to escape in most circumstances, since there are mechanisms where I could prove my innocence. Of course, under a totalitarian criminal justice system where I have no hope of proving my innocence then I could ethically attempt to escape.

Also, I don’t have the right to kill innocent people even to save my life, that is a well established ethical principle. If I can’t kill people to save my life, I certainly can’t kill innocent people to escape from captivity. For instance, if I’m escaping from a maniac who believes he is my owner, I can’t ethically kill little Timmy just because Timmy saw me escape and is likely to be forced to give information to the maniac. Timmy isn’t threatening me with deadly force, I have no right to kill him even if it means I am recaptured or killed. However, if Timmy’s older brother recognizes me as an escaped slave and threatens to use deadly force to recapture me on behalf of my owner, then I can ethically use deadly force against big Timmy.

I can ethically kill my owner even in his sleep if I reasonably believe that there is no other way I can escape his future use of deadly force against me. But that belief has to be reasonable, I have no right to use deadly force against him unless he represents some future threat, I can’t ethically use deadly force against him just because he’s an asshole. And my reasonable belief about his future deadly threat depends on circumstances. If I can call the cops and the cops can come and arrest him, then his future threat isn’t great. If he is a member of an entrenched slaveholding aristocracy and I can reasonably believe that he will continue to threaten others slaves with deadly force even after I escape, then I can ethically use deadly force against him.

So in a situation similar to the antebellum south, I could ethically kill a slaveowner to escape if there was no other way to escape, since his holding me as a slave is backed by his continuing threat of deadly force unless I obey. If I could escape without killing him however, my use of deadly force would only be justified if it would reasonably save others from future threats of deadly force.

26

So let’s take it a step further. A slaveholder beats a slave to death for disobedience. You are not his slave. He has broken no law. Would it be ethical for you to execute him?

27

I believe that “the proper authorities” who arrest, try, convict, and sometimes execute criminals are only doing so as our agents, it is we the people who have decided that is what should happen. In modern day America it is usually immoral to “take the law into your own hands” because our designated agents are usually much better at arriving at an equitable result…less prone to error, more transparency, results are arrived at publicly, laws are arrived at in advance, people accused of crimes have protection.

However, a cop who arrests a murderer, the prosecutor who tries him, the judge who presides over the case, the jury that convicts him, the guard who imprisons him, and the executioner who kills him are acting as our agents. Executing a murderer is only ethical if we are exercising our right to self defense against a reasonable threat of deadly force in the future.

So to answer your question, it would be ethical for me to kill someone I saw beating a slave to death only if I reasonably believed it would save someone else from being beaten to death in the future. If the slaveowner has lots of slaves, and routinely beats them and threatens them with deadly force, such a belief is reasonable.

If I can call the cops rather than killing it it would be better to do so, but only because the cops, courts and prisons are experts at that sort of thing, not because they have exclusive rights that the rest of us do not. If there are no cops, no courts and no prisons, then each of us is obligated to dispense our own brand of justice, pardner. The trouble comes when others don’t agree with our brand of justice, so they attempt to enforce THEIR brand of justice, and we all have to rely on the protection of clans and we get blood feuds and on and on. If I truly believed that there was no better way to enforce justice than to do it myself, I’d do it myself. In 2005 America, instances like those are few and far between. In 1805 Mississippi there would be quite a few more. In 905 England there would be even more. In the 20,005 BCE mammoth steppes there would be no other choice than reliance on self and family. But even in 2005 America our criminal justice system derives its legitimacy from our individual rights to protect ourselves. We still have the right to enforce justice…it’s just that for prudential reasons it is almost always better to delegate that right.

28

Tiresome nitpickery, Liberal, and you know it. If I’m anthropomorphising “nations” then the reader is perfectly capable of parsing my statement as referring to “those founding fathers who determine the policies of the nations”. And no, I don’t believe I did posit the inherent “rights” of nations. I am under the impression you can do better than this. Please do so.

::shrug:: [ad] I do not believe that, as a slave, you have recourse to any higher authority to arbitrate what is or is not the slave owner’s right. In practical terms, the slave owner is in a position to impose less amenable conditions on the slave if whatever minor lenience is extended to the slave is taken advantage of. It is plain then that gratifying your desire to kill whitey, kill whitey, or kill little whitey, results ultimately in harm to your fellow slaves, and possibly even in no benefit to yourself. Your supposedly “moral” choice looks a little quixotic in the light of that.[/ad]

29

That is a lie, and you know it.

Then you are invoking the inherent rights of founding fathers. Or does my using your own words once again constitute “nitpickery”?

Sure you did. You said that a nation may choose to assert axiomatically whether people have rights. By what authority do nations — er, founders of nations — proscribe rights if that authority does not inhere to them? If people don’t have inherent rights, then why should founding fathers have the right to say that other men don’t have rights? Founding fathers are people, aren’t they?

Lucky for me, I suppose, that I was under no such reciprocal impression.

30

Well, I can readily conceive of a situation where little Billy knows too much and must be taken out and I can’t see a problem with it, given a presumption of the slave’s inalienable right to self-defense and self-determination.

Toss him down a well. Lassie’ll save him eventually.

31

Let’s see… “Nitpickery”… arguing the toss over whether nations can do anything, or only their component citizens. “Tiresome”… that’s in the eye of the beholder, I guess, but trust me, I found it tiresome. “And you know it” - well, possibly you are genuinely unaware of being tiresome, but I don’t think you should assume that I know this for a fact, and if I don’t know for sure that you aren’t aware of being tiresome, it is unnecessarily harsh to call me a liar.

No, I’m not. I’m talking about what they can do and historically have done, without invoking any right they may have (had) to do so. This isn’t hard, surely?

laughs and passes over the logical fallacy without comment

No, I didn’t.

laughs and passes over the cheap mockery without comment

In practical terms, simply by the extent to which they, and those who go along with them, are prepared to safeguard some rights and deny others. We may say that might does not make right, but if no-one is prepared to guarantee my rights, I can go whistle for the same. I have no inherent right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, not as far as the universe is concerned; if I step off a tall building, the only right I have that matters at that particular time is the right to increase my vertical velocity in a downwards direction at 32 ft.sec[sup]-2[/sup], neglecting friction. Any other rights exist only because I am, or someone else is, prepared to work for them.

I did not say that they did; indeed, I only stated that nations (I’ll carry on anthropomorphising, since everyone, including you, understands quite well what I mean) may choose to assert that rights do exist. They can do this; they have done this. Do they have the right to do so? How should I know? Where is the supreme arbiter of what right is? The laws under which communities govern themselves have yet to be framed by someone who stepped off a fiery mountain bearing a scroll declaring his right to draft such laws, as far as I’m aware. What are we left with? What some people are prepared to assert, and sufficient people are prepared to go along with.

Ah. I cast the bread of good manners upon the water, and when it returned to me it wasn’t fit to eat. I think I can manage not to lose sleep over it.

32

If it is a nitpick, why does it have its own word? You used it yourself — anthropomorphizing. In fact, there is another word — hypostatizing. Also, reifying. In other words, you committed a logical fallacy, the responsibility for which you are attempting to dodge and pass off to me.

And now the nitpickery crier is examing each word and commenting on it. Rich, that.

To remind you, it was you who first said that I knew I was nitpicking. If you can read minds, why can’t others?

Nor is it rights, surely. You have confused the usurpations of bullies with the dispensations of rights. Perhaps you would attribute to the man with the gun who chose not to kill you the title of savior.

That wasn’t a comment? What was it, random spots on the screen?

Yes, you did.

Passes over? You misspelled “imitates”.

Nonsense. You are saying that a man was not born with a nose just because someone cut it off his face.

What do rights have to do with law? You are born with your body, and therefore have a right to life. You are born with your mind, and therefore have a right to give or withhold consent. You are born as a subjective reference frame, and therefore have a right to liberty. You seem to view rights as some sort of permissions.

Good manners? You smugly dismiss my point as “tiresome nitpickery”, and you fancy yourself to be Miss Manners? I believe you know that a small clique of off-boarders has attempted to pin a label of “nitpicker” on me, and that you took advantage of what you perceived as a weakness in order to give a legitimacy to your argument that it otherwise did not merit. If you wish to debate honestly, then address the points made with counterpoints, rather than mocking them with meaningless slogans. In fact, if you wish to continue your hijack, I ask you politely to take it to the Pit. That is the place for smear campaigns.

33

Descendant of former slaves checking in here.

My answer is “Yes” on all counts, with a “f- this in order to escape caveat” on the last one.

By being slaveholders (I assume we’re talking lifelong hard labour here, as practiced in the US and here in South Africa, not indentured servitude), they’ve become fair game. That includes ground glass in their porridge, poison in the entire family’s coffee, a date with a pickax handle for little Billy if he can’t keep his trap shut. It’d be a one-man war of liberation. “By any means necessary”.

Assuming I was the kind of man who could do it, of course. I’m not sure I’d have the personal courage to, but if someone else does, I say no moral blame attaches to him.

34

Force is, ultimately, the basis of all property. The only way monopolistic use of the thing I own is ensured is by providing negative consequences for others who try to use it.

The slaver asserts “I own you”, and you may not use yourself, and sets forth consequences such as death for attempting to do so.

The slave says “I own myself”, and will counter the slaver’s consequences with consequences of my own.

Swallow that, little Billy. Your father, ultimately, killed you.

35

But not all force is coercive. Libertarians do not oppose force.

36

Agreed. You and I differ on when property ownership becomes coercion.

37

Strangely, Liberal, I do manage to formulate some opinions of my own without needing to be in lock-step with some off-board clique of which I am not part and only vaguely aware. Your troubles with people pinning labels on me are no concern of mine, and when I call you for picking nits it is because I consider that you are picking nits, not because I have resolved to hang the dog that has been given a bad name.

I observe that you have not only been Pitted recently on your own account but have manfully stepped into another’s Pitting for an extra dose. I don’t see the sense in going that route when I have nothing to add.

If you tell me what earthly difference it makes whether we say “a nation resolves to do so and so” or “a group of persons defining policy for a nation resolves to do so and so”, then we can maybe put the nitpickery question to bed once and for all. Don’t just call it “anthropomorphizing”, “hypostatizing” or “reifying” - explain why it matters. Otherwise I’ll continue to believe that you are being obtuse for its own sake. That doesn’t invalidate everything you have to say, and I didn’t claim it did.

Now the question as to whether or not someone is born with a nose is easily resolved by examining his physiognomy. The question of whether or not he is born with rights is less obvious. You are born with a body and therefore have a right to life? On a personal level, I agree. The advocatus diaboli however demands a sterner test and says: “Really? And this right to life guarantees what, exactly? Will it defend the newborn against disease, want, neglect or abuse? Then what is it good for? Ditto your right to give or withhold consent and your right to liberty. Will any of them accomplish anything but a nice warm feeling unless steps are taken to guarantee those rights?”

Can we take just one of those points: “You are born with a body, therefore you have a right to life” and demonstrate that you have not begged the question? (The syllogism is missing its major term, which I infer from context to be “All that is born with a body has a right to life”. I am open to correction.)

Yes, that’s one way to look at it. Members of the community opt to extend permissions to one another, normally on an understanding that they will be given permissions in their own turn. Steps are taken to punish those who do not fulfil their end of the bargain. We argue that some permissions ought to be universally available and not contingent upon merit, and we call them “rights”; but “rights” are nothing more or less than what we have agreed them to be.

38

:smack: “pinning labels on you”

39

Although the epistemic emptiness of your Pit observations is somewhat dubious, I am willing to put the matter of your ad hominem behind us if you are so inclined. Meanwhile…

Hypostatization makes a difference for the same reason that affirmation of the consequent makes a difference. Or denial of the antecedant. It is a logical fallacy, and therefore robs an argument of its validity. As Ludwig von Mises put it, “The worst enemy of clear thinking is the propensity to hypostatize, i.e., to ascribe substance or real existence to mental constructs or concepts… Hypostatization is not merely an epistemological fallacy and not only misleads the search for knowledge. In the so-called social sciences it more often than not serves definite political aspirations in claiming for the collective as such a higher dignity than for the individual or even ascribing real existence only to the collective and denying the existence of the individual, calling it a mere abstraction.” (*The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science *, “On Some Popular Errors Concerning the Scope and Method of Economics, The Pitfalls of Hypostatization”.

You may argue that a nation has gone to war, for example, but you may not argue that a nation has killed ten thousand soldiers. A nation is an abstraction, and does not do what concrete entities do. It does not make choices or decisions. Brains are required for those, and nations have no brains. Collectivist allegory is valid only when the collective is identifiable in the capacity as itself. A nation at war is a whole nation at war; i.e., its enemy sees every element of the set as an enemy. But a nation thinking and choosing and writing out laws is misleading, lending an authority to an argument that it does not merit and making a claim that is unassailable. If my nation is proscribing rights, then what am I, chopped liver? I am ostensibly part of the nation, and I am not writing any laws or proscribing any rights; nor have I given my free and willful consent for these to be done on my behalf. If you are allowed to establish that a nation acts as a human being, then I am by fiat stripped of the ability to offer a counter-example. If the premise that the nation has spoken on the matter is accepted, then my own voice cannot contradict it if I, too, am part of the nation. I would violate the rule of noncontradiction if I spoke out. That’s why, at its root, it is a logical fallacy.

Why the prerequisite that a right must guarantee anything? Rights are not metaphysical entities, but ethical ones. There is nothing to guarantee that you are right when someone steals your wallet and they are wrong. It is simply a premise of ethics that no one has any business stealing your property. Rights are principles, not permissions. They are attributes of property ownership. You own your body and your mind; therefore, you have rights with respect to them. Rights accrue to propriety.

I think that the above explanation should clear that up.

Unless I am part of your “we” — and I am not — you are mistaken.

40

Such as “essence”?