I’d still love to know if a reasonable person TODAY knows that slavery is evil, to which I’m not so convinced.
As an interesting aside, I have in-laws in India. They have a “servant.” She is the daughter of their previous “servant.” If you went over there today, and asked about it, there is no way you would leave thinking she wasn’t a slave. The girl is cared for, loved, and extremely well treated. And the people she works for all rich and highly educated.
This is an example TODAY of where reasonable people alter the notion of slavery and evil to fit with their cultural norms.
There is one thing for certain though, they were ALL aware of US slavery and thought of it as evil.
Okay, so start working backwards, remaining in the “first world.”
When do you see a point where a reasonable person would first consider slavery just so-so? Civil Rights act of 1964?
You appear to believe that during the Civil War, a reasonable person didn’t think slavery was evil. so can we pin point a time between then and now?
And also flipping the argument over, if slavery wasn’t seen as “evil” was it ever seen as “good?” Hey, let me do you have a favour and make you my slave. Sure beats living in the forest searching for berries.
I’m not seeing the causation. People insult and deride their opponents in warfare and other things, and that has always been the case. When you’re going into battle against a bunch of barbarians, it helps to get yourself worked up and angry at them before hand. Especially when the battle was in the form of a lot of guys swinging sharpened hunks of metal at each other over and over again until one side broke under the fury of the other. To me that isn’t an action being taken to “justify” anything, it’s just the same sort of macho mind pump that people engage in to this very day when it comes to athletics.
I honestly don’t think there were many cases at all of people “justifying” their subjugation of other peoples until the late age of Imperialism, say, 1830s and later. During this time I do think everyone from the British, Germans, French to William McKinley were coming up with a myriad of reasons to justify things that they knew they probably shouldn’t be doing. Usually couched in language saying it was “better” for the people they were subjugating to be under the yoke of the wise-white man with his true religion than to live as “godless animals.”
But I genuinely believe the 19th and early 20th century imperialists knew the morality of their actions, and simply chose to act in an immoral manner for greater glory of the empires they were building.
I strongly contrast this with, say, the Muslim invasions and conquests in the middle ages. Muslim leaders weren’t talking about conquering the infidels as an “excuse to do something they thought immoral”, but rather it was a way to motivate people to support their cause. Motivation has always been huge in warfare, even in undemocratic societies. It is important that you get at least the majority of the ruling elite emotionally invested in your endeavors, and it was important that you distill some form of motivation down to the lower classes. I don’t genuinely believe Suleiman the Magnificent felt that his actions were immoral and that his invoking of Allah was just a justification to do something he already wanted to do. I rather think that Suleiman thought his actions perfectly moral and invoking the greater glory of Allah was a way to get others to more readily align with his cause.
So it was a motivational tool, not a tool of ethical justification. I am firmly convinced of this primarily because actions like invasions and conquests typically were never looked at under the “lens of morality” until very modern times.
That’s what we CALL them, yes. You don’t even have to go to India, though. You can stay in the US. Until last year, the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands, which is a US territory, had its own immigration policy. The islands were known for their textile factories, and the workers at the factories weren’t, for the most part, islanders. Instead, the factories used “temporary contract workers”. These people, who were usually poor Chinese, were in effect, debt slaves These workers lived in horrible conditions, working 12 hour days for next to no money, living in barracks, being beaten, in some cases being chained, pregnant women being forced to have abortions, women and girls being forced into sex slavery, and all sorts of other horrible things.
This is a problem that’s happening now, on US territory, and while some of the worst of the conditions have been alleviated, people there still live in horrible conditions in what is slavery.
Well, I started this thread thinking just that, but I find myself reading and re-reading Martin Hyde’s very well-written brief history of the world post and beginning to think that while I wasn’t wrong to say that slavery has been considered by reasonable people to be acceptable at many points in history, it may be that by 1860 in the American South, it wasn’t reasonable.
So I’m tentatively prepared to accept this notion of “the end of the 1700s, in Europe and America.” This coincides nicely with the legal ending of the slave trade in the New World, incidentally.
The abortion argument belongs in a different thread, but it can be used to illustrate my point. (I’m not replying to any of the abortion arguers, so no quotes.)
The problem here is the question of what’s “reasonable”. IMO, reasonable is what the average person would see as a valid argument. Not “correct”, merely valid. Are we starting with a (mostly) agreed upon set of starting “axioms” (to borrow a math term)? If so, then we are arguing something “reasonably”.
Which brings us to the abortion bit. That is still “reasonably” being argued, because most people agree on a mostly similar set of axioms. So that question comes down to arguing about “what is human?”, not “what rights do humans have?” The “rights” question is already agreed. The “human” question is still being “reasonably” (at least by some people) argued. It’s still possible to “reasonably” come down on either side of that question.
On to slavery. The argument at the time was “who is inferior, and what rights do we owe the inferior?” Until those questions are answered by reasoned argument, and one side wins, a “reasonable” person can come down on either side.
Given that, I would say that the pro-slavery side (at least in the US) had lost the argument sometime in the 1840 - 1860 timeframe. After that, no “reasonable” person could justify slavery. Their argument was already lost, requiring them to resort to “that’s what we’ve always done, so that’s what we will continue to do”, which is, of course, not a “reasonable” argument.
The argument over “are blacks inferior?” was not resolved until later, but the “what rights do we owe the inferior?” was pretty much resolved sometime during those 2 decades.
Slaves were free labor (nothing at all fallacious about that), when you consider that everything the slaveowner “gave” to the slaves was produced by the slaves themselves. The slaveowner didn’t “house” the slaves. The slaves built their own cabins, using their own labor to cut down the timber for their own shacks. So the slaveowner had to pay for the timber and nails. Okay. But where did that money come from? Slaves. It came all from slaves.
I made this argument in a recent thread about slavery. It’s a joke to talk about costly it was to feed and house a slave as if all these things sprang from a vacuum. Slaveowners wouldn’t have been living in mansions and sending their boys to prep schools if slaves were costly.
I apologize for using the term “free labour.” It’s basically a lazy short hand. The point being that if your business relies heavily on man-hours, your goal will be to minimize the cost of labour.
Even today, the issue of how to pick fruit and vegetables in the US is a major concern. If you had to pay people minimum wage (and don’t forget health care) to pick oranges they’d cost way more than $1.99 a pound. My point is that compared to paying someone a living wage, slavery is pretty close to “free.”
That’s a snap shot view rather than a dynamic view. You have to include the cost of the aquisition of the slave, amortized over the expected life of that slave. Then you need to work in to the equation the value of offspring of the slave.
It’s a hideous calculation that to me starkly shows how evil it was. People are reduced to stores of value. I think I am right in saying that a massive percentage of antebellum wealth in the seceeding states was held in the form of slaves.
If it’s not clear, I’m agreeing with you. In most case, any costs associated with buying and maintaing a slave were more than offset by the income they generated, either in the cotton field or auction block. This is why southern society had such a hard time confronting their own cruelty and judging themselves as immoral. Money got in the way.
Slaves reproduced themselves. So although you had to buy slaves to start your business, over time you no longer had to do this because new slaves were constantly being born. If you had too many slaves and not enough work, at no time would you have any problem selling them off. And make money in the process, since odds are you’d be selling off slaves that you didn’t even have to buy in the first place.
The only time that slaves stopped returning value at the auction block was until after the Civil War had started. That tells me that slaves were almost always an investment that paid off (at least post cotton jin), so talking about how costly it was to take care of them makes no sense. You’re talking about multi-generational plantations that were in the business of were churning out cotton and human bodies, and profiting handsomely from it. When you look at it from that perspective, it patently obvious that slaves were “free labor”.
I’m sorry, I should have been clearer. I thought the second paragraph showed what I was saying. I agree that slavery was profitable for the slave owners (though not for the society as a whole). But what I was trying to say was that it can be seen more as an investment/store of value thing than simply as a get someone to pick the cotton thing. It was so enmeshed in Southern society that it wasn’t going to be given up willingly.
Knowing something is evil means that either you don’t do it, or you do it anyway because you are a psychopath.
If all those women are happily abusing their daughters-in-law, it’s because they don’t think it’s evil. Just knowing that it sucks to be on the wrong side of a one-sided relationship is not the same as knowing it’s evil.
You would have to think of slaves as human in order to think that it was any worse to think of slaves as stores of value than it would be to think of a draft horse as a store of value. I don’t know if people in the South believed this.
Other people simply didn’t want get rid of slavery. So they rationalized by telling themselves that the slaves weren’t even human… sure you could make an argument that they were human but they weren’t really human like you and me. In fact any argument that enslaving black folks was immoral was a “red herring” because you have to be human before enslaving you was wrong. And no amount of insistence that a slave is a person will make it one.
So in the South a reasonable person might think slavery was OK and those crazy abolitionists in the North only wanted to abolish slavery to persecute the South. The abolition of slavery would barely affect the North and yet their hatred of the South was driving them to push for the abolition of slavery, I mean why do they even care anyway (other than their hatred of the South)?
And don’t forget that abolishing slavery would mean you’d have to let African Americans vote, and eventually they’d elect one of their own!
Can you imagine the Hannity’s of the day saying stuff like that, "how can we afford to let them have rights, it will destroy our society and cause a massive economic crisis! Let them have freedom, then they’ll want to own land, they’ll want to marry, then they’ll want to vote, eventually we’ll have a black president!
I guess it is all a slippery slope. I love moral relativity.
When you consider that African Americans represented about 40% of the population in southern states it’s not hard to imagine the fear of suddenly making them free. What would that do to the unemployment rates?!
There is a similar phenomenon in my culture as well. mother-in-laws frequently make their daughter-in-laws lives miserable. My mother used to sit me down and tell me my paternal grandmother was evil because of all the misery she had put my mother through.
Then I got married and my mother tried to pull the same sh1t. I moved to a different state. I had kids that she only got to see in pictures. My father was as good man but he never had the balls to choose between his mother and his wife. Now my mother has apologized for her behaviour and we are going to spend mother’s day with her (my wife forgave her yearas ago (she saw her mother do the same thing to her sister-in law) but I needed an apology before I could forgive). I suspect my wife won’t be pulling the same sh!t with her daughter-in-law when/if son gets married.
Vote? Whoa, we don’t even let our sisters and wives vote, what makes you think merely freeing slaves would mean we would let them vote. You can’t vote in this state unless you have a penis and (a) own land (b) can read or write, or (c) your grandfather could vote.
Yeah, if they weren’t around the rest of us would be able to get those jobs picking cotton at living wages. Can’t we build a fence or something?