Sudanese Slaves

Great Debates
21

The Ryan:

I said:

Apologies, I should have been more explicit. How’s this:

I do not believe your analogy is valid. I see the owning of stolen property to be fundamentally different from the ownership of another person.

But indirectly, and that’s my point. The direct transaction is to release someone from slavery. This does benefit the slavers and provides an incentive for them to enslave more people. But my entire thesis here is that the immediate and direct result of removing someone from slavery is paramount. The option is to allow them to remain enslaved while broader solutions are being undertaken, and that I find intolerable.

And yet you are willing to allow people to remain enslaved now, when there is a mechanism in place to release them.

I know you aren’t supporting slavery, of course. But I hope you see that the spin works both ways. You can insinuate that I’m supporting slavery by approving the purchase of freedom, and I can respond that you are supporting slavery by not support any and all means of freeing slaves.

I think it’s more accurate to say that one does not pay someone for something unless the ostensible owners believe they own that thing.

And in the meantime there are people enslaved who could be free.

I’m extremely reluctant to answer hypotheticals. Real-life situations rarely boil down to simple answers, and in my experience hypothetical ethical problems exist only as exercises or traps. But what the hell.

B. He was tried and convicted. Whjat parallels are you drawing here?

With calling the police not an option, and without an actual situation in front of me, I cannot really answer the question.

As a general rule, however, I prefer to support the indigent (and all those other nice-nice words for the poor and/or homeless) through the government and charitable organizations, and do not give beggars money.

Shoot the hostage.

Again, this is so broad and simplistic as to have no meaning.

22

Originally posted by andros

I agree with you that we must free current slaves but the point is that this temporary solution will only worsen the situation. Where there is blood there are sharks. And it isn’t just that they’re enslaving people, they’re killing the men of the villages. When the slaves are freed, there are no men to support them. Just women and children. They become sitting ducks in their villages for another raid.

If these churches can send fake slave buyers to make these
purchases, I’m sure the U.N. can track down the raiders themselves.

Since the raiders could not care less about economic sanctions, the first part of my solution is to hunt them down. The problem with this is that Sudan won’t allow the U.S. or the U.N. into its borders for such a mission. Perhaps an African Nation’s coalition force could be used to track the Sudanese (and other African) traders down and bring them to justice.

The second part of the solution would be for the African nations to provide a peacekeeping force to protect pillaged and vulnerable villages. The women and children need a military-type presence for their protection seeing as that all their men have been slain. The villages that have not yet been attacked also have no self-defense capabilities.

23

Oddly, I rather thought I had suggested several practical solutions to fighting slave raiding by rendering slave holding more difficult by providing sanctuary to escapees, assisting people in place.

I suppose reasonable suggestions should be ignored now and again.

Now as for the Mambo suggestion, let’s think about this.

(a) The Sudanese military dictatorship arms and encourages the milities doing the raiding as part of their war against rebels. One can imagine that the Sudanese military will look dimly upon efforts to hunt down, as Mambo says, its own irregular units.

(b) The Sudan is in the midst of a civil war which has largely raged on since its indepedence. It is a civil war. Formally speaking, international law, despite the recent Kosovo intervention, does not allow for the armed intervention in internal affairs. Civil wars for better or worse are internal. You’re not going to get anyone to risk their asses in Sudan. NOBODY. No African peace keeping force. Nobody. Congo has yet to work out, Seirre Leone is a borderline disaster, the Sudan with a fairly well armed central government is definately not going to get an intervention.

© There is a military presence in the South, a number southern “liberation” movements, several of highly dubious character (can we say warlords?) exist. It might, stress on might, be helpful to fund the Garang movement so as it can extend its influence since it seems, stress on seems, to be the best run of the bunch.

Start with the basics folks, get that right and electrons won’t be wasted.

24

Andros, while I understand that protesting the rescue of innocent people is almost impossible to swallow, here is alnother way to look at it:

There is presumeably a flat rate of people enslaved–probably the number of people that the slave traders and their customers can support/use. By pumping money into their pockets we are rasing that flat rate (especially if they use that money to go out nad buy better weapons, as Collunsbury suggests). So buying slaves basically amounts to buyying Sally’s freedom at the cost of Jenny’s. Now, if Sally were someone I knew, I’d do it, horrible as it is. But as long as both the current slaves and the potential slaves are equally faceless, I think we have to accept that buying slaves changes nothing, except for which random person is enslaved.

If you think of buying slaves as hte forigner walking up and handing them Jenny and exchange for Sally, and then saying “Al least Sally is free! that can’t be a bad thing!” even as Jenny is lead away, wailing, well, you can see why it seems really morally abhorant–almost as a self-indulgent way to make oneself feel better without actually changing something.

Collounsbury’s suggestions seem wise to me, and it is also possible (if distressing) that there simply isn’t any practical way how the West to do much about this particular injustice at this particular time, and that perhaps the time and money would be better spent on some completely different group of people who have equally urgant needs but whose needs can be positively effected by money and time. it’s sort of ghastly to think of triage on a global scale, but resources are finite. and slavery isn’t the worst thing that can happen to a person—it is merely one of the worst. I do think that it is important that people are aware of the problem, so that if the situation changes in the future and more effective intervention becomes possible, we will know and can act.

25

That’s a bit more explicit, but you’re still not showing a connection between the two statements (“your analogy is invalid” and “stolen property is not the same as people”). Is part of the fundamental difference between goods and people that it is not okay to buy stolen goods, but okay to buy kidnapped people? If so, how?

If we focus on the immediate effects and allow ourselves to miss the big picture, or to dismiss it as less important, we will find that while every individual one of our actions was working towards an immediately good goal, in aggregate our actions were in the service of evil. “The path to hell…” and all that.

But one that makes us complicit in the slavery. Participating in slavery is not the way to eliminate it.

Anytime anyone advocates “any and all means necessary”, I become very worried. There are very few evils in this world, no matter how repugnant, for which one cannot find a worse evil. And often the best way to find this greater evil is to adopt an “any and all means necessary” attitude towards solving the first problem. If to oppose an “any and all means necessary” attitude regarding an evil is to support that evil, then I must be guilty of sexism, racism, homophobia, censorship, theft, and myriad other evils.

When the repo man comes for the car of a delinquent customer, will he refrain from taking the car if the customer is convinced that it truly is his car? If the repo man were to pay the customer for the car, would not that be an implicit acknowledgement that the car does indeed belong to the customer?

I see the central issue as being between a specific person’s rights, and a more widespread right, a right to justice. In the first case, we can either have a specific wife and child suffer, or have justice suffer. You chose to support justice. In the next example, you gave no clear answer, and in the last you again chose justice (sort of), unless that was another sarcastic parody of our position. So why did you choose justice in these situations, but not in the slavery situation? How is someone’s freedom being held hostage for money different from someone’s life being held hostage for political demands?

26

Nope. The difference is that I do not feel a moral obligation to free stolen goods. I do feel a moral obligation to free people who are enslaved. Things are just things. People are not property, even for a second.

Basic premise: No one must be enslaved, ever, for any length of time. All permament solutions proposed are long-term, allowing those currently enslaved to remain so.

Rather than leaving even one person to remain enslaved, I submit that it is not wrong to free those in bondage now. If that means an increase in the number of slaves, release them. And so on until the long-term solutions can take effect.

Paying a slaver is repugnant, more so when we do not acknowledge that slavers “ownership” of his slaves. But if we are to rely on the rule of law in the long-term, we must place our trust that the rule of law will bring to justice the people we have dealt with.

I am in no way dismissing the big picture or the long-term as unimportant. But my basic premise, that no one must remain a slave for eve one more second, requires that short-term solutions be effected as well.

I’m sorry you see that as advocating slavery. I suspect that we are at an impasse. Feel free to continue to think of me as Satan incarnate or whatever.

(BTW, “Shoot the hostage” is a line from the movie “Speed.” It was intended as a joke.)

I’m going to be way busy at work this week–apologies if I don’t get back any time soon.