Nat Turner, as a slave, is not responsible for any of his actions. His owner is morally culpable for anything his slave does.
Sure I can. And I do. In a very few specific instances I’m a moral absolutist and this is one of them.
No excuses for the slaughter of children. Absolutely none. And it’s potentially not just white children, even if you want to limit your stance to the very specific institution of American chattel slavery. I mean I assume for consistency’s sake your opinion would be the same if rebelling slaves were butchering the children of Cherokee slave holders.
The murder of children is tragic. And entirely the fault of the slave-owners. One could quibble if Nat Turner is still a slave, but until a slave is unambiguously free, I tend to think they are not responsible for anything that happens.
‘Extremism in Defense of Liberty is no Vice…’
Morality goes out the window in a slave society. No one can judge how a slave acts in such a society. In a chattel slave society, the moral responsibility for anything and everything bad that happens having anything to do with a slave lies 100% with the slave owners and slavery supporters. There are no exceptions. A slave could rise up and, in their rage and despair at everything they witnessed and suffered, murder every single baby on Earth, and the fault would entirely lie with the slave owners and slavery supporters.
We don’t hold people with mental illnesses responsible for what they do if it’s caused by their mental illness. And rightly so. Do you seriously think that someone subject to daily brutalization, who’s had their family ripped apart in front of them, who may have witnessed their children raped and murdered, is gonna be acting in their right mind all the time?
That’s why morality goes out the window in a chattel slave society. That’s why such societies are so profoundly immoral. That kind of routine brutality begets endless violence and suffering. Humans can only take so much.
The oppressors are certainly morally culpable for the acts of those that wield the knife. But the flip side, that those that wield the knife are therefore absolved of blame, does not hold for me.
But I have no intention of going at this hammer and tong for thirty posts. My opinion is just that and this is a far-off-the-beaten-path hijack of even this random omnibus thread.
Yeah, this is an unneeded hijack.
Back on topic: if a slave trolls on this board, do we ban the slave or their master? 
Not as a mod, but as a poster reading along. Can you please take this interesting hijack to its own thread?
Yeah I think it’s an interesting discussion, maybe a great one for GD. And it has nothing to do with trolls. The suggestion that Max_S is a troll because he doesn’t find white supremacy inherently detestable is the closest that discussion ever got to this thread topic, and itself had nothing to do with slavery, let alone the morality of a rebelling slave’s actions.
New poster likes Elon Musk. I’m sure he’s completely legit.
Combative attitude in his thread about socialist utopias too. This trock’s coming in with guns blazing.
You’ve gotta take a little time
A little time to think things over
You better read between the lines
In case you need it when you’re older
You wanna know what socialism is
You want us to show you
You wanna feel what socialism is
You know we can show you
Folks. Don’t feed the troll.
He’ll be gone soon enough.
And the thread has been closed.
Closed and cornfielded.
I think we did a pretty good job with that one! It definitely didn’t get what it wanted.
So, did we ever figure out what Socialism was? 
'When Socialists complain about Capitalism, they describe Capitalism.
When Capitalists complain about Socialism, they describe Capitalism.’
So… probably not.
I was getting ready to tell him, but then the mods seized the means of conversation.