And yet my points stands.
It isn’t much of a “point”, unless you are contending that making federal inmates stamp out license plates is - as bad as Hitler.
Who has introduced federal inmates into a discussion about slaves? It was not me.
I’ll admit it’s a gray area. The idea that slavery is wrong is an outgrowth of the idea that individuals have personal rights - and it’s impossible to say exactly when that idea started. And there is a cultural factor - it’s hard to question assumptions that you and everyone around you take it for granted.
But clearly, wherever you draw the line, the southern slaveowners were on the wrong side of it. They certainly understood the concept of people have rights, as they invoked it on their own behalf. And they lived alongside non-slave societies that demonstrated the alternative.
So, Aristotle. Utterly unreasonable for his position on slavery?
I’m not sure there is much to be gained without properly defining “slavery” and “evil.” And I’m not saying that to be a dick. A very legal case could be made that a person believes “enslaving another man is evil” and also believe “Blacks are not human” so that enslaving an African American isn’t any different than enslaving a horse. Every genocide that I know if starts with a group of people that know murder is evil, then redefines the other side as not-human for the purposes of killing them.
So the question isn’t if they knew slavery was evil, it’s whether or not they knew African Americans were human.
The Biblical Story of Exodus tells of Moses freeing the Israelites from salvery. The slaves in this case are the protagonists, and freeing them was seen as good (the opposite of evil). If slavery was seen as a perfectly acceptable thing to do, Moses should have been hanged. It’s not hard to imagine that Christians in the South would have learned this story and known at least in this case slavery was wrong.
Notice that for the most part, whites in the South didn’t have white slaves, why was that?
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
All men are created equal, but African Americans are not men.
Now, I am not a constitutional scholar, but during the Philadelphia Convention wasn’t there negotiation to decide “how much of a man” an African American was, finally settling on 3/5th? I was under the impression that 10 states had already outlawed slavery (hence, knew it was evil), but to get the Southern states to sign on they had to allow it for at least 20 years.
This isn’t really that theoretical of a discussion. This wiki page has an entry from 3rd century BC when Ashoka abolishes slavery in the majority of India.
OK, I’ll agree this is a colorable argument. (Odious pun not intended). But it just seemed to me that many people (as evidenced by this thread) take the position that it’s NOT a gray area, that slavery is wrong for all time, and any breathing human being should know it.
Obviously, it does little good to debate the specifics of whether the southern slaveholders were unreasonable if you adopt the position that slaveholding is per se unreasonable at any point in human history.
It was me, when I pointed out that slavery takes many different forms - including enslavement for debt or crime.
To which you responded with your “Hitler” comment.
Point being that not all ‘slavery’ is alike and the issue is not as obvious as it appears.
Take enslavement in Africa itself, for example. Prior to the distortion of African society by European demand for chattel slaves, enslavement was a resonably common punishment for certain crimes. Was this unreasonable, ‘as bad as Hitler’, in a society lacking prisons?
Immediately upon the concept arising; along with murder, thievery, torture, and many others. Because it’s a matter of enlightened self interest to classify anything you don’t want to happen to you as evil.
You might as well ask when in human history a reasonable person should have known that abortion (at least some forms of abortion) is murder. They knew all along but some people just didn’t want to recognize the evil because it would have negatively impacted them to recognize slavery as evil.
About 20min after learning was evil and slavery meant, so roughly 20,000 years ago. Probably a few days after discovering that murder and theft were evil.
Once the human brain had the ability for empathy, it’s not a long stretch to realize that if you yourself wouldn’t enjoy being a slave then someone else wouldn’t enjoy being a slave.
The rest of the discussion is then just a matter of cultural norms. If you grow up knowing purple people have green people as slaves it’s going to seem more normal than evil. But you’ll know that having a purple person as a slave is evil, but that for what ever reason green people don’t count.
A false analogy; a mindless embryo isn’t a person. A slave is.
What about mindless slave?
But for what reason? Even after their own slavery in Egypt, Mosiac law permitted Jews to own slaves. Slavery was “wrong” in that case because God said, “Let my people go!” It wasn’t wrong as an institution.
Yeah, not much of a scholar.
Ten states had outlawed the slave trade: the import and export of slaves for foreign lands. That’s not the same as saying ten states outlawed the internal practice of slavery.
In fact, the Philadelphia Convention took place in 1787. At that time, only Massachusetts (1783), Vermont (1777), Pennsylvania (1780), New Hampshire (1783), Connecticut (1784), and Rhode Island (1784) had all either ended internal slavery or passed laws providing for the gradual emancipation of slaves.
And again, it was the slave TRADE that was given another 20 years to run, and was promptly outlawed in 1808. This, obviously, did not end internal slavery.
:rolleyes: And this one has a nice little recitation about how well that worked, and how long slavery existed in India after that.
Ashoka also abolished the death penalty, by the way. Are we all agreed that it, too, is evil?
But I certainly wouldn’t have wanted an abortion to happen to me.
So why isn’t it “enlightened self interest” to recognize it as evil?
People didn’t think this way prior to the last few hundred years. Your very position is the result of over a thousand years of progressive human thought.
Society condemned murder and thievery because they lead to societal instability. At the same time, no society condemned the massacre and genocide of conquered peoples until very recently. It isn’t entirely because people back then were too stupid to recognize the hypocrisy, it is because massacre of a conquered people was viewed as a legitimate and moral action at the conclusion of a war.
The concept that “all humans” should be treated as you wanted to be treated is so modern as to make it hilarious that you speak about it as though it is something people have always thought.
The genocides and massacres that have happened since c. 1780 aren’t notable because they happened, they are notable because society started to reject them as legitimate acts of war.
But as I pointed out, as far back as 3rd century BC an Indian Emperor recognized it as evil and banned it along with the death penalty (and deforestation).
As early humans were coming up with the concepts of right and wrong, and documenting rules and laws, the concept of imprisoning someone without reason, or forcing labour without reason, would have followed right along with murder and theft. The important distinction is how you define your “reasons.”
The Code of Hammurabi dates back to 1790 BC and is full of references to slavery. I guess my point here is that slavery was given reason (by birth or crime). I suppose we could argue when it was reasonable to conclude there is no “justifiable” slavery.
I don’t think there’s much point at looking at slavery throughout human history since, as Martin Hyde so excellently described, it has taken so many different forms. In 50 years there will probably be Dopers wondering how anyone ever accepted the “slavery” in Chinese factories, which I think is a pretty good parallel.
In terms of slavery in the US, I really doubt that an ordinary person on either side of the issue would have an easy time ignoring the status quo. If you grew up in the north and were surrounded by abolitionists, you probably thought slavery was wrong, and vice versa in the south. If you lived in the south and you never came in contact with slaves, either to see the brutality of the practice and/or to be given an opportunity to realize that Africans were people despite constantly being told otherwise, what opportunities would you have to change your mind?
But, correct me if I’m wrong, we’re not talking about ordinary schmucks, we’re talking about Lee and Davis, right? Two well educated, slave-owning men. They would have had every opportunity to see the brutality of slavery first hand. I’m having a hard time convincing myself that even a lifetime of indoctrination would let me be OK with the sort of behavior that Malthus described in post #12. To be able to dedicate my life to protecting an institution like that would either require willful ignorance or some level of evil.
Whether whites believed blacks to be human is a question I’ll put aside for now. But I will say that there is evidence that the belief in inferior subhuman races is one that slave-holding societies “evolved” into, because it minimized the cognitive dissonance associated with chattle slavery. The concept of biologically defined races is relatively new.
However, let’s assume that whites came by their belief in black inferiority honestly. That doesn’t pardon slaveowners for the suffering that the institution caused. We view dogs and cats as animals, but do we idly sit by and let them be whipped, raped, and degraded without at least speaking out against it? Even livestock have social and, more recently, legal protections to help ensure that they are treated inhumanely. If a horseowner said that that he’d whipped his horse for an hour because it wandered off, they’d be condemned. Even in the 1800’s this behavior would probably be seen as unacceptable.
But blacks could be treated this way and it was okay. Blacks weren’t really treated like animals; they were treated worse than animals. Why? Because they were very much human and therefore couldn’t be controlled the same way that animals can be controlled. The amount of brutality required to “tame” a human and keep them in their place is almost unreal. You can build a tall fence around cattle and they will stay there. They won’t try to run away. You can’t do that for a person. So you have to beat them into submission on a regular basis, or threaten them with such. This is what slavery required.
All of this is to say that even if we allow for the stupidest case scenario, that whites just didn’t know they were dealing with real live human beings with souls and such, that doesn’t change the fact that they had to actively ignored suffering to keep blacks enslaved. They had people who were crying and dying right in front of them, but they accepted it.
It’s also a form of “projection of the modern world” to even make the argument that ancient or pre-modern man would conclude “I don’t want to be murdered, so I shouldn’t kill a vanquished enemy in warfare.” Or to conclude, “I don’t want to be a slave, so I shouldn’t enslave others.” That is what I was talking about upthread when I said that up until very recently most people weren’t “reasonable.”
Prior to the modern age people didn’t make conclusions like “I don’t want to be a slave so I shouldn’t enslave others”, people thought that whatever they were told was the right or moral behavior. Most people were told what was right by their parents, and their parents were going off of tradition and what they were told by local religious leaders or perhaps local superstition and et cetera. As you grew up these traditions were just enforced as you were exposed to other adults in the community (religious leaders, prominent men and et cetera.)
Generally speaking issues like “is it right to enslave someone?” didn’t even come up, because it didn’t actually have any real impact on the 95% of human population that eked out a subsistence living outside of the cities and in which they never needed to know or think about anything that happened more than 2 miles away from the hut they were born in.