This is true, and I recognize that you were answering a question about motivations. As far as morality goes, I don’t think the motivations make much of a difference- it’s the actions that count.
Appreciated. This has been an unfocused, wide-ranging thread, with a lot of ideas being interjected, thus a lot of cross-chatter.
I disagree with you here. Intent isn’t the sole criterion that makes an action moral or immoral, but it is the most important one.
I strongly disagree- undoubtedly there were slave-owners who thought (for example) they were helping a slave who, say, had tried to run away, by whipping him for punishment- and thus “helping” him to understand that his proper place was to be a slave on the plantation. IMO that doesn’t make it any better at all than a slave-owner who whips a slave because he’s a sadist.
Note- I started a new thread about motivations and morality to avoid a hijack of this one.
I shall post in that thread.
I hear that. 
And you hear it in English. 
Works great, don’t it?
Whale Oil Beef Hooked.
The way L. Sprague de Camp explained it in Great Cities of the Ancient World, the Romans never actually set out to conquer the known world. As with the British Empire, they conquered it “in a fit of absence of mind.” They just happened to have a better army than any of their neighbors (being intensively trained, and always willing to learn and adopt new weapons and tactics). Wars with neighbors happened all the time as a matter of course, and the Romans kept winning the wars, and gaining territory. But now they had new border with barbarians on the other side of it raiding Roman territory . . . so to defend their established territory they had to go conquer those barbarians . . . and so on.
Or something related to English according to some linguists’ theories, anyway . . .
Nonsense. Most immigrants are economic migrants who are moving precisely because life is better/easier in the west. Be that via jobs, benefits and inclusive of the standard of living. As for your other point, well perhaps a new thread is in order.
That poem’s nuttin’! Weak-kneed PC multicultural bullshit! Check out Kipling’s “A Song of the White Men”:
BTW, as to all that, see post #20 above.
Actually, they even had a clinical name for the mental illness that makes a slave want to run away: Drapetomania.
They also had a clinical name for slave-laziness: Dysaethesia Aethiopica.
A missionary in Darkest Africa was captured by the natives one day, and next thing he knew he found himself chin-deep in water in a huge cauldron (which can’t exist without blast-furnace technology, I know, shut up). He thought he was a goner, until he saw a native with an elaborate headdress, obviously the chief, kneeling by the cauldron with head bowed and hands clasped.
The missionary cleared his throat. “Pardon me, my brother, are you, perhaps, a Christian?”
The chief looked up and glared at at him, and snapped, “I certainly am! And please don’t interrupt me while I’m saying grace!”
OK, but answer me this: In the late Samuel P. Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” theory of international relations, post-Cold-War, with Communist ideology no longer a factor, there is a small number of cultural “civilizations” in the world, which will account for most international conflicts, nations of the same civilization more or less aligning with each other as against those of other civilizations. “Western” civilization includes Europe west of the Catholic/Orthodox divide. (“Orthodox” is a different civilization, which accounts for the political schizophrenia of the post-Soviet Ukraine, Catholic in the west and Orthodox in the east. But European Catholics and Protestants alike are “Western”.) Western civilization also includes the U.S., Canada, Australia – but not Latin America, that is a separate “Latin American” civilization – even though, as with the U.S. and Australia, its people speak a Western language and follow a Western religion.
Now, why is that? Why does “Western” civilization include Spain and Portugal, but not Latin America?
Like I said, you need to travel more.
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Well shucks, I seem to have misplaced my time machine.
I should hope by now we all know the answer to that!
Fourth. Don’t forget the Sasquatch.