Inspired by this post in this thread, but I thought the possible discussion warranted its own thread, and in GD to boot.
To summarize briefly, the discussion was about the Confederacy, and the competing claims that they knew or should have known that slavery was manifestly evil, or that they didn’t. Diogenes’ position:
A very fair question. But my response:
That’s the debate.
I go out on a limb and say that the slaves knew that slavery was evil from … oh lets go from Day one. What you are asking is when the slave owners and others should have known.
Really? Because I’m betting I can find instances of former slaves owning slaves.
Did they forget?
What slaves certainly knew is they didn’t like it. But I suspect most throughout human history thought the institution of slavery was a part of human life.
But suppose someone is a racist asshole and believes that the slaves are less than human. That person will never consider it evil, to that person they are just another beast of burden.
I think you might be missing the possibility that they did consider it an evil - but didn’t care, so long as it was not them enslaved.
I think in order to judge whether slavery is evil, one needs to know the enslaved persons - not necessarily personally, but a general understanding - and to know the circumstances of their enslavement. If some person is aware that, say, a certain group of people are enslaved, but either has no contact or has no awareness that the enslaved group are persons, I don’t think it would be fair to call them evil. In other words, they have to know there is a party to be wronged. And then they have to know what slavery actually involves, and the extent to which it is made worse by the general situation they find themselves in; basically, they have to know the crime.
On that basis, i’m not sure there is a time period in which i’d feel safe to say that a reasonable person would have known this. It’s a matter of knowledge and context, which varied wildly from place to place.
Eh. Evil is part of human life. Saying slavery was a routine part of the human experience doesn’t in itself mean it wasn’t evil.
Greek tragedies are built around the idea that the protagonist ha a fatal flaw that brings him (or her) down. They resonated with the ancients, who understood that having tragic flaws is a normal part of the human experience – but they still depicted the people in question as flawed and consequently, even properly punished by the gods for these flaws.
I guess we could get into the semantics of what exactly we mean by “evil.” But the Iliad depicts the sack of Troy, the killing of Trojan noncombatants, and the enslavement of the Trojan women as a tragedy. Greek audiences, even knowing that the Trojans were “the other side,” were moved at the awful, cruel, unjust fates of the Trojan women.
They knew it was wrong – even if routine – in BC times.
The English-speaking world pretty much resolved the debate decades before 1860, except for one particularly recalcitrant region that insisted on its right to the “peculiar institution.”
You talk of centuries and then criticize the South for being a few decades behind the curve. Not that they weren’t wrong for being there, but that looks a little arbitrary - and cuts to the heart of this thread.
I actually doubt most slaves in say, the Roman Empire era and earlier had the sort of opinion that “slavery as an institution is evil.” Back then slavery was seen as a sort of temporary state that you were brought to mostly due to bad fortune or sometimes bad decisions (for example becoming so indebted.)
While Rome wasn’t a society with great social mobility, there are many stories of slaves becoming slave owners.
Slavery actually was widespread and common throughout many parts of Europe up until the year 1500 AD. Where it went away it was replaced with serfdom, which to a modern observer was very little different from slavery itself. In fact, serfdom as it was practiced in Russia was the same in every respect as slavery outright (Russian serfs could be relocated at will, were frequently moved from being farmers to industrial workers, Russian boyars and seigneurs frequently had serf harems and even sent some of their serfs off to academies to learn the performing arts so the great Russian landed aristocracy could have their own personal serf theaters.)
I’d say at least up until the point in history where we can say a “significant” portion of the population recognized serfdom as being morally wrong, we can’t really say that most people recognized slavery as being wrong. By and large the move from outright slavery to serfdom (which again, in many ways was little different than true slavery) was one of economic self-interest for the nobility and not a move of political enlightenment.
Emperor Joseph at the end of the 18th century started to indicate that he believed serfdom to be a moral wrong, but even as Emperor he was unable to abolish it. (I believe it persisted in the Habsburg Empire until 1848.)
By and large in continental Europe, I’d say most people, from serf to King were taught that it was for the good of all that there was a small class of people who ruled and owned mostly everything and a large bulk of people who were bound permanently to service to the ruling class. Obeying and supporting that system was taught as the religious and Christian behavior, so in fact trying to advocate against said system was viewed as a sin.
Interestingly, in most of the places in Europe where serfdom died earliest (it was considered an obsolete practice by the 15th-16th century in England), it went out of practice because it was viewed as being economically inefficient compared to other ways of organizing and running agricultural communities. [As a total aside, slavery as practiced in America prior to the American Civil War was not at all in the economic interests of anyone, even the large plantation holders would have done better under a different system if they had the education and intelligence to run things better.]
Ultimately, the question is “when should a reasonable person have known slavery was evil?” Well, I’d say prior to 1700 in Europe, “reasonable” persons would be hard to find. Most people prior to 1700 in Europe were illiterate, believed anything they were told, and did not question authority. I’d say prior to 1700 the only people that might think slavery evil (and I consider serfdom to essentially be a form of slavery) were a few enlightened, educated members of the nobility or the clergy. Even in the European countries that had more or less abandoned the seigneurial system prior to 1700, in those cases it was a change for economic improvement and not a morality thing.
Probably the earliest country in which an average person plucked out of a local tavern would know slavery was immoral would be in England, possibly as early as the 1600s, but even then I suspect most Englishmen would not view the enslavement of non-Christians as immoral. Keep in mind it was for many years that in England it was considered moral to persecute Catholics and even kill them.
Now, all that being said the 1700s were momentous for two reasons. Firstly, there was a communication revolution (I won’t get into it, but realize that before the modern era a country like France was more a patch work of regions that most people were born and died in, never leaving the area around their small village), due to better roads and national level governments that began to understand the importance of a maintained road system. Secondly, the overall increase in wealth lead to more people who could read (it was obviously still common to be illiterate) and thus more people who started to have informed ideas about things and greater moral issues. By the end of the 1700s if you couldn’t read you still probably were exposed to the news because many taverns and other meeting places had several people in them who would read the news to their illiterate friends.
The increase and exposure of the masses to the written word, and the increase in communications meant there was finally enough underlying structure for genuine moral ideas to actually spread and be considered by a wide portion of the population. (Much of European history omits the fact that the lion’s share of the people were kept ignorant, bound to a master, and poor. Most of the great thought and achievements that came before the 18th century in Europe only happened within the small portion of human society that was lucky enough to be born into the ruling class.) So I can say with some confidence that by the end of the 18th century most people probably should have known or at least considered the possibility that slavery was evil.
Certainly Americans of 1850, to a man, should have been able to conclude this from all that they knew of the world.
That means nothing. In India it is traditional, and even expected, to make your daughter-in-law’s life a living hell. Certainly not every Mother-in-law does it, but many do. She is expected to be your servant.
And many daughter-in-laws go through this utter misery, literally waiting for the mother-in-law to die and for their own son to get married - whereupon they inflict the same terrors on their daughters-in-law.
Did they forget it was evil or how it felt? Hell no. They just want some payback.
I think the slaves knew it was evil, too.
When we talk about slavery as it was practiced in the Americas, and whether people should have known it was wrong, it helps to talk about what slavery actually entailed to fully understand the question. It was more than “owning” someone.
More often than not, it meant rape. Not only rape between whites and slaves, but also between slaves. Women were expected to breed, so that massa could have another body in the field or another body to sell. There were slaves whose only purpose was to make more slaves or be on hand to satisfy white men.
Slavery meant your children did not belong to you. They could be sold right from under you. They could be beaten and you couldn’t say anything about it. They could be raped or killed and there was nothing you could do about it.
Slavery meant you could be beaten for little cause at all, except to make an example out of you to others.
Slavery meant you could lose your life if you were caught reading, of all things. Slavery meant that you could not leave the estate without risking life and limb for being a runaway.
To not know that slavery was wrong really meant turning a blind eye to suffering. I have not a doubt that people were capable of ignoring suffering, because history has shown that humans are rather skilled at doing that when it suits their purposes. There is no doubt that there was a lot of suffering going on that white people simply ignored and rationalized away. How could they not rationalize it away? They would have gone crazy if they hadn’t.
But they were still wrong. Just because they were living in a time period where “everyone’s doing it, mom!”, that doesn’t free them from blame and make them exempt from judgement. It would be worse if we didn’t judge them, because we take on the risk of repeating their same behavior if we look back at them with eyes that are too patient.
Sure. Which is why I asked, “When in human history should **a reasonable person **have known slavery was evil?”
Everyone knew that slavery was nasty, of course: but “evil” implies something more, that slavery as an institution was a moral wrong. This isn’t necessarily as obvious as it first appears.
First, slavery has throughout history taken many forms. The chattel slavery based on race, by which one group of humans is considered inherently inferiour and thus suited to slavery as a condition, is a relatively recent and unrepresentative form.
Far more common was slavery as the consequence of losing a war, or being enslaved for debt or crime. Such slavery may be “bad” indeed - Romans for example did pretty well whatever they wanted to slaves, worked them to death in salt mines, made them fight to the death in the arena for amusement, etc. - but it could easily have been seen as ‘bad’ in the same way that war itself was ‘bad’ - an inescapable if regrettable part of life in a dangerous world. Lose a war, and slavery was the consequence - better than massacre, because if you are lucky and clever you could esacpe slavery.
Recognizing that slavery as a state or institution was always bad requires a recognition that humans have inherent rights that cannot be taken away, something that was a reasonably late development. Even now, slavery as a punishment for crime isn’t so wrong as to be unthinkable. It isn’t obviously worse than (say) imprisonment for crime itself.
You claim the South was “a few decades behind the curve,” but you’re wrong. The South didn’t come around to giving up slavery because it was wrong, in a few decades, or ever. Instead, the federal government eventually had to kill a lot of the proslavery people, destroy the Confederacy as an organized political entity, and break the will-to-resist of the survivors. Slavery died hard; every effort was made to perpetuate it.
There would still be slavery in the South if those guys had been allowed any say in it. Extending its reach and ensuring its permanence was perhaps the dominating idea of Southern politics for decades before the war. It was the perceived threat Lincoln’s election posed to slavery’s permanence that precipitated secession.
Abolition in the US was triggered largely by the Great Awakening, a series of waves of Christian revival during the 18th century.
Regards,
Shodan
And who of all people in history have no excuse for failing to recognize this?
Recognition that humans have inherent rights that cannot be taken away is the second, and justly most famous, sentence of America’s founding document.
With the exception of Martin Hyde’s brilliant and insightful post, everyone here seems to argue some variant of, “It’s always been evil, and everyone should have known it, no matter what.”
eta: post #12 and onwards weren’t there when I wrote this
Doesn’t this to an extent beg an important question, though? What are you meaning by reasonable?
Reasonableness can be looked at as a changing standard, defined by the mores of the day. Which would almost be to say that a reasonable person should have known slavery was evil when a significant portion of his society knew slavery was evil. Which isn’t particularly meaningful.
Um, yeah, and it was pretty revolutionary at the time. We are talking about “when in human history”. Should the matter have been obvious to the average citizen of republican Rome, almost two millennia before the Declaration was drafted?
Indeed, it seems a reasonable argument can be made that chattel slavery based on race was a reaction to a growing awareness that humans have inherent rights - deny the humanity to deny the rights. If that is the case, the answer to the question in the OP is ‘when specifically race-based chattel slavery developed’.
So has mass genocide.
Not expecting a thread like this for Hitler and the Rwandans, though.
Took 19 posts to Godwinize. That’s not so shabby. 