Which is to say, not really needed it–we mostly got by without it when it was gone, and without the devastation of the War itself, even the southern economy would have been okay after a general manumission–but manufacturers, merchants, shippers, and banks in the North profited enormously from slavery and the fruits of slavery (as did, of course, those Southern industries which used the slaves directly).
There was considerable pro-slavery sentiment in the banking center of New York City, for example.
Really. If you want to tie it to a modern issue, try, well, slavery. Human trafficking, prostitution rings, countries and religions where women are considered subhuman and subservient (and provide free labor), and companies whose goods are produced through slave labor. Buying a football, doing business in Saudi Arabia or going to a strip club may not be the same thing as owning slaves – but they could very well be connected to and supporting modern day slavery, the kind that may have people wondering, one day, what kind of people could have supported it.
Isn’t this pushing into the no true Scotsman area? You’re basically defining a reasonable person as someone that knows slavery is evil. Hence, all reasonable people know slavery is evil. A person that doesn’t know that is unreasonable.
Doesn’t really get us any where.
It feels weird to have to write this, but over the course of human development, it was considered very normal to view others as non-human. Think about Columbus landing in the West Indies. Or that pygmy that they put in a zoo in New York. I would think that a “reasonable” person in London in the 1700s wouldn’t consider an Aborigine from South America as “human.” Any more than we would if an alien ship appeared over NY.
Since the other thread was really about the specific institution of American chattel slavery, a particulary brutish, cruel and dehumanizing system even under the standards of historical slavery, then questions regarding ancient slavery, indentured servitude, etc. are not really relevant. The OP is trying to cloud the issue of whether the Conferderates knew the specific institution that THEY were using violence to defend wasm by any reasonable metric, evil.
The asnwer, obviously, is that they should have known it from its beginning, and thet they DID know it from it’s beginning. That’s why there were always abolitionists. Americans didn’t just get struck with some magic epiphany in the 1860’s. They always knew it. Thomas Jefferson called slavery “an abominable crime,” and a “moral depravity” among other deoercations. Why did he say that if people were too stupid to know it was evil back then?
The Southerners who defended slavery must have known on some level. Which is why they were extremely uncomfortable being reminded of it, to such an extent that the House of Representatives had a gag rule prohibiting the subject from even being brought up.
When Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts made a passionate speech on the floor of the Senate denouncing slavery, Representative Preston Brooks was so enraged by it that he nearly beat Sumner to death.
You wouldn’t have seen this kind of violent response if slavery was simply a matter of naive innocence on the part of slave owners.
My own impression is that the development of race-based chattel slavery is in large part a response to the congnitive dissonance of the existance of slavery in a culture heavily influenced by religious and Enlightenment principles. Deny the humanity of slavery’s subjects and you justify the evil of slavery as an institution. Hence the abolitionist slogan in response: “Am I not a man and a brother?” (never mind a woman and a sister, but that’s another story). If slaves are “men” and “brothers”, presumably it would be commonly accepted that chattel slavery was wrong.
If this is true, the question in the OP answers itself: the rise of a need to justify slavery indicates an awareness that it requires justification, that it is otherwise morally wrong.
When you think about the mental gymnastics necessary to defend slavery with a clear conscience, you see that such a mentality was incompatible with a “reasonable person” as we define it today.
How can you justify enslaving your own children, for instance? People walking around looking like you, maybe even calling you pappy, but they’re not allowed to do something as simple as read a book or walk into town without papers because their blood is tainted with black.
In plenty of cases, slaves were more white than black, and looked very much like white folks. And yet they were still considered to be animals? Yeah, how perfectly reasonable belief this was.
No, I was pointing out that convincing yourself that blacks aren’t human, especially when you have actual contact with them (for generations, to boot) requires you to be unreasonable, because it’s factually wrong. The very fact that that they successfully kept blacks enslaved for so long demonstrates that on some level they knew better; you just can’t keep humans under control with measures designed to keep something less than human controlled. Look at the way they banned reading; does anyone ban teaching reading to a dog? If they had deep down really believed blacks to be subhuman, they would have been slack enough for the slaves to organize and kill them.
They largely started considering the local people nonhuman only after they decided to start exploiting them. You are switching cause and effect.
I notice a theme in this argument; the apparent belief that moral hypocrisy is a modern invention, and that our ancestors were all innocent yet misguided.
The people who did things like that weren’t reasonable; they were insisting on using someone to prop up their racist fantasies. That’s not reasonable. As for aliens; the analogy doesn’t work because they genuinely wouldn’t be human, not as a matter of self justifying fantasy.
By that I mean a reasonable person is not simply “able to reason,” and if that WERE the definition, then of course the vast majority of people ARE able to reason. You have set some arbitrary bar about how well or deeply they can reason, which brings us back to the physics of superfluidity. Feynman reached his understanding of the subject through reason – why haven’t you, or the vast majority of the human race, also do so? Indeed, you don’t even have to have the leap that he did to first conceive of his insights; you can follow in his footsteps.
But you can’t.
So “able to reason” is either manifestly true for all but a tiny fraction of unfortuate humans, or a sliding scale set arbitrarily to where you feel it will enhance your particular position.
Not useful. A reasonable person is a person that acts or feels on a position in the way that an ordinary, average person in his or her position would not consider surprising or out of the ordinary.
In that case, it’s pretty much impossible to judge people for going along with what the rest of society is doing. “Reasonable”, average people are capable of doing shockingly evil things. That may be precisely the point you are trying to get at. There’s some quite persuasive evidence that people base their own morality largely from their environmental influence rather than their own internal compass.
The Milgram experiment showed that an average person will, if told by an authority figure in a white lab coat, administer extreme and possibly fatal electric shocks to another person.
The Stanford Prison experiment showed how quickly a culture of abusive and sadistic behavior can be accepted by otherwise ordinary people. Students who were assigned to be “guards” started to become cruel, and the other guards and “prisoners” went along with their assigned roles with few objections.
I want to say Martin Hyde you are presenting an excellent argument. I agree with you pretty much 100 percent. I wish people were actually getting the arguments you were making.
People from different cultures hundreds and thousands of years ago had very different world views from people today. For one thing, most of them weren’t very free, and viewed slavery as the lowest of many levels of subjugation. They considered it rational that nearly everyone had a master one way or another. Children had to obey their parents. Soldiers had to obey their commanding officers. Everybody had to obey the king/god/pope etc. To disobey was considered immoral. Lots of cultures viewed their rulers as gods or descendants of gods. Failing to obey them would be the worst crime one could commit.
The Ancient Romans didn’t view slavery as evil at all. It was your moral duty to go out and enslave people because it made you and your family and friends and country more powerful. In some of Cicero’s letters he prides himself on his humane treatment of his slaves. Particularly, he was proud of freeing very old or very sick slaves so that they could die as free men. So Cicero, living in 1st century BC, thought it was rational to be kind to slaves, but it doesn’t seem to have ever occurred to him that one would not own slaves.
So most people throughout history would not have known that slavery was evil because their definition of evil would have probably been very different from yours or mine. The Aztecs would have probably considered you evil if you suggested they stop with the human sacrifices, because that would make the gods angry and then they’d punish the people.
That being said, the actual historic examples of ancient abolitionists are very interesting.
When in human history should a reasonable person have known slavery was evil?
We’re still working on it. I know that my life style, simple as it is, depends largely on slavery in various forms around the world, largely enforced by the US miiltary. In a very real sense, I am a slave to a system which profits on slavery, death and destruction. I’d like to see it changed but massa got too big a whip.
On the subject of slavery, slaves are likely to see it as evil. The masters? Just good business.