So, depending on the circumstances, you would either merely not help them flee slavery, or you would actively participate in enslaving them.
If you’re going to admit that you don’t even think slavery is wrong, how the fuck are supposed to see you other than a racist who sees black people as inferior?
Kant was largely ignorant of other races. He lived his entire life in Konigsberg on the Baltic Sea and is not believed to have ever been more than a day’s horse ride away from the city. He died in 1804, and virtually his only knowledge of, and experience with, non-European races was in travel journals that basically asserted indigenous folk around the globe were a “lower order of human.” That to me is very, very different from a more modern racist who has a lot of scientific and logical reasons to know that is bullshit, Kant only could know the world through reading, and when the only people writing the books were reporting strongly bigoted prejudices as facts, he had little real ability to know any better.
As someone dead since 1804 Kant doesn’t really need defense or excuse–he was a very smart man, but you can’t easily be smarter than the knowledge sources of your culture/society. That should be the proper frame of reference for evaluating his racial opinions–which essentially are without merit, but also importantly do not much intersect with his deontological ethical framework for which he is most well known.
I would go with 4 if I was scared of the repercussions. I don’t know how Vermont felt about enforcing fugitive slave laws in the mid 19th Century; if there would be any liability for me personally, etc.
I would go with 3 because IMO harboring a fugitive is illegal and I think it is wrong to be a party to an illegal act. As I think Socrates said, if I had a problem with the law, I have had all these years to move somewhere else.
Now if I was some religious abolitionist country bumkin who knew nothing about the law I might just give him shelter. But I also wouldn’t be me.
~Max
Some laws are so profoundly immoral that to follow them is morally unacceptable. If you can’t recognize this, then your system is morality is defective.
I meant more the (3) or (4) response. That’s defensible from a Kantian perspective, but Kant, taken to extremes, is evil.
Under that framework, you’d report Jews to Nazis or escaped slaves to the authorities because that would be the legal requirement, which happens to be Max’s argument.
During Kant’s time, it may have been somewhat defensible without modern context, but given the atrocities that have occurred since, totally indefensible now.
Following a clearly immoral law is no virtue.
And if you’re putting someone else’s life over your discomfort with following the law, that’s kinda screwed up too.
So the law is the arbiter of all morality? If you were living in Nazi Germany would you turn yourself in because it would be wrong for you (half Jewish IIRC) to break the Nazi law?
I get your point, but there’s other circumstances apart from a single judgment. Someone who’s robbed by a member of a different race is likely to think all members of that race are thieves. Are they racist when they complain about being robbed?
If I were in Nazi Germany and had the fortitude I would turn traitor and flee, or join a resistance movement, I don’t know. I won’t assume I am that strong of a person. But I wouldn’t necessarily blame a German citizen who would choose 3 or 4.
~Max
Are they? I’ve had bad interactions with people of every race, but I don’t let those interactions color my perception of all other people of those races.
That would be racism.
Only if they make it a point that it was a member of a particular race.
Depends. Do they complain about an individual robbing them, or about how race X are all robbers?
Breakin the law, breakin the law.
And, of course, when you are sheltering in the basement avoiding patrols, you would perfectly understand why and agree with the german who discovers you in his house calling them down on you, right?
Kind of, yes. If they complain about a < insert race here > person robbing them instead of complaining just about being robbed, e.g. “I just got robbed, that sucks” is not racist, “It’s just like
some Swedish oaf to rob a fellow” is.
So why is it OK for you to do that under the hateful Nazi regime, but it is not OK for a slave to do that under the hateful Antebellum regime?
Would you advise any German citizens who come across you trying to escape to turn you in to the proper authorities? If not, why would you advise these Germans to behave so differently than you yourself would in 1800s US?
That’s actually a misreading of Kant’s famous “would I lie to a murderer searching for my brother” argument. This person explains it better than I can, but basically people have cherry picked one somewhat bad argument Kant made at one point in his life and ignore the fact he had a larger body of work exploring the concept in different ways (for example he held a lecture on ethical lying at one point):
Kant, lying to a murderer, and bad philosophy – The Metaphilosophy Blog
Sort of, but also not. What if the murderer is a legal agent of the State?
All the talk about the law here may distract us from the fact that the original subject was his opinion about American History only being white American history.
That has nothing at all to do with the law, so he can’t use his “but the law says” argument for that one.
So, you would “undo” all the laws protecting legal rights in a nation predicated on the principle that, “all men are created equal”? You don’t have a “narrow read” of the Constitution, you have absolutely no understanding of it.
The social compact falls apart when I’m declared a non-person due to no fault of my own. It’s okay for a slave to flee under a hateful Antebellum regime - I won’t blame him.
But for me to break the compact to help the runaway slave, or for the German citizen to break his or her compact to help the Jew, is a different matter.
~Max