The Morality of Slavery

[Beerina]

"Invented" presumes that the earliest humans didn't have something akin to slavery. Wolves, pan trogoldytes, and many other species have complex hierarchies where the dominant animal controls the eating, sleeping, and mating choices made by animals of lower status. The earliest societies with slavery treated their slaves about how a dominant social animal treats his or her social lessers. I doubt very much that the first homo sapien was born with egalitarian attitudes.

Actually, that humans don't have vicious claws and teeth is probably why slavery can exist in humans. So too, rape and murder. If he or she who you're attacking stands a good chance of eviscerating you or ripping your throat out, you're far less likely to try to impose your will on them.

Our inherent passivity and physical weakness is what allows our species to oppress each other. Chalk another one up for Yahweh's grand design!

 

[Beady]

Actually, that humans don't have vicious claws and teeth is probably why slavery can exist in humans. So too, rape and murder. If he or she who you're attacking stands a good chance of eviscerating you or ripping your throat out, you're far less likely to try to impose your will on them.

Interesting thought. There's a saying that runs something like, "Those who beat their swords into plowshares will plow for those who don't."

There's another that goes, "When the lion and the lamb lie down together, neither will arise hungry."

You have to do a little stretching to make them fit the context of the conversation, but they're not entirely inappropriate.

 

[AWPrime]

Actually, that humans don't have vicious claws and teeth is probably why slavery can exist in humans. So too, rape and murder. If he or she who you're attacking stands a good chance of eviscerating you or ripping your throat out, you're far less likely to try to impose your will on them.

Our inherent passivity and physical weakness is what allows our species to oppress each other. Chalk another one up for Yahweh's grand design!

*makes notes for designing new lifeform*

 

[ImaginalDisc]

Actually, that humans don't have vicious claws and teeth is probably why slavery can exist in humans. So too, rape and murder. If he or she who you're attacking stands a good chance of eviscerating you or ripping your throat out, you're far less likely to try to impose your will on them.

Our inherent passivity and physical weakness is what allows our species to oppress each other. Chalk another one up for Yahweh's grand design!

I don't get what you mean at all. Wolves and chimps are both extremely formidable animals, and yet they treat their social lessers almost like slaves. It's not about armament and lethal weaponry, it's about relative power and control.

edit: It was late. I was tired.

 

[losman]

I had a religous nut try to explain that slaves in the Bible were actually more like indentured servants and it was not as bad as we perceived. I found his defense disgusting, he felt if it was in the Bible it had to be ok.

 

[Beady]

I had a religous nut try to explain that slaves in the Bible were actually more like indentured servants and it was not as bad as we perceived. I found his defense disgusting, he felt if it was in the Bible it had to be ok.

Actually, he was right, up to a point. While it has usually been more desirable to be free, slavery in the ancient world was far from a death or hard-labor sentence. In Rome, freed slaves often remained with their former masters as paid servants or as household clients.

And, as the thread has demonstrated, slavery was not a moral issue until more modern times. While your disgust is justifiable in a modern framework, from a historical perspective you have no moral reference point upon which to base an argument.

 

[ceo_esq]

I think it's telling that there was little serious talk of banning slavery on a large scale until the first stirrings of the industrial revolution rendered the practice obsolescent.

I don't know what you would consider to be a large scale, but slavery had disappeared from England by about the turn of the 12th century, due in part to an active abolition campaign. Obsolescence may also have had something to do with it.

I had a religous nut try to explain that slaves in the Bible were actually more like indentured servants and it was not as bad as we perceived.

There have historically been a wide range of social and legal institutions that tend to be brought together under the modern term slavery, and various forms of indenture are among them. I don't know much about unfree labor in the Old Testament, but it's at least possible that your religious nut had a point.

 

[Beady]

...but slavery had disappeared from England by about the turn of the 12th century, due in part to an active abolition campaign.

I'm going to have to ask for references on this claim, or at least a more detailed explanation. For example, there's only a semantic difference between serfdom and slavery. British abolition was still centuries away, in 1100.

 

[ceo_esq]

I'm going to have to ask for references on this claim, or at least a more detailed explanation.

One source I have in mind is the relevant article on slavery in Medieval England: An Encyclopedia (Garland, 1998). Unfortunately, I don't have it at hand and wouldn't be able to cite from it until sometime tomorrow. Until then, you might want to consult this page, which refers to the famous Council of Westminster in 1102. I believe Ireland declared a general emancipation toward the end of the 12th century as well.

For example, there's only a semantic difference between serfdom and slavery.

Now that is a claim that cries out for support. But in fact, the differences between serfdom and slavery are significant, as would no doubt be apparent to a slave contemplating the lot of a serf.

Not that I blame you for the confusion, as this point is sometimes obscured even in academic treatments of the subject. Rodney Stark, discussing the decline of European slavery in For the Glory of God (Princeton UP, 2003), notes:

[A few historians] reject the decline of slavery by claiming that nothing more took place than a linguistic shift wherein "slave" was replaced by "serf." ... Here it is not history but historians who are playing word games. As Marc Bloch noted, the life of medieval serfs "had nothing in common with slavery."[47] Serfs were not chattels; they had rights and a substantial degree of discretion. They married whom they wished, and their families were not subject to sale or dispersal. They paid rent and thus controlled their own time and the pace of their work, "which was generally slow and ... individualistic."[48] If, as in some places, serfs owed their lords a number of days of labor each year, the obligation was limited and more closely resembled "hired" labor than it did slavery. As Bloch put it, "The slave had been an ox in the stable, always under his master's orders; the ... serf was a worker who came on certain days and who left as soon as the job was finished."[49] ...

While no one would argue that medieval peasants were free in the modern sense, they were not slaves, and that brutal institution had essentially disappeared from Europe.


[47] Bloch, Marc. [1940] 1961. Feudal Society. 2 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. p.260.
[48] Fogel, Robert William. 1989. Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery. New York: W.W. Norton. p.25.
[49] Bloch, Marc. 1975. Slavery and Serfdom in the Middle Ages. Berkely and Los Angeles: University of California Press. p.23.

 

[Beady]

All well and good, but we are still left with the British slave trade, which lasted until the early 1800s (and, illegally, for some time after). Seems to me that claiming any difference between trading in slaves and engaging in slavery really is semantics.

ETA: Also, from the Wikipedia:

In the 17th century, slavery was used as punishment by conquering English Parliament armies against native Catholics in Ireland. Between the years 1659 and 1663, during the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland by the New Model Army, under the command of Oliver Cromwell, thousands of Irish Catholics were forced into slavery. Cromwell had a deep religious dislike of the Catholic religion, and many Irish Catholics who had participated in Confederate Ireland had all their land confiscated and were transported to the British West Indies as slaves.

All of which happened well after 1100.

 

[Ladewig]

"Invented" presumes that the earliest humans didn't have something akin to slavery. Wolves, pan trogoldytes, and many other species have complex hierarchies where the dominant animal controls the eating, sleeping, and mating choices made by animals of lower status. The earliest societies with slavery treated their slaves about how a dominant social animal treats his or her social lessers. I doubt very much that the first homo sapien was born with egalitarian attitudes.

With the two notable differences of (1) any wolf in the pack may challenge the dominant male to a fight and if challenger wins he becomes the leader and (2) any wolf can leave the pack to either live alone or try to join another pack, either as the dominant or as a subordinant.

Editted - I missed your reference to earliest humans. Perhaps in that stage, one or both of the differences were present, but by the time civilization rolled around, the elimination of those two points were institutionalized in the definition of slavery.

 

[ceo_esq]

All well and good, but we are still left with the British slave trade, which lasted until the early 1800s (and, illegally, for some time after). Seems to me that claiming any difference between trading in slaves and engaging in slavery really is semantics.

...

All of which happened well after 1100.

I am led to infer from all this that the British slave trade, which seems clearly prohibited (though how effectively in practice?) in the 1102 document, reappeared at some point after the end of the Middle Ages, rather than having existed as a continuous (or at least a continuously lawful) institution. I'll look for more information about this.

At any rate, as promised, from "Slavery and Slaves", Medieval England: An Encyclopedia (Garland, 1998):

People became slaves in several ways. Warfare was a fruitful source throughout the Anglo-Saxon period. Crime and debt led others into slavery. Sheer starvation caused by agrarian disaster or social upheaval must also have prompted others to enslave themselves to survive.

...

By the time of the Domesday Book (1086) slaves formed only 10 percent of the recorded population, though they were unevenly distributed, with the largest percentage being in the southwest, an area conquered rather late by the Anglo-Saxons.

Thereafter slavery disappeared rapidly. Opposition from prominent clerics discouraged the slave trade. Norman control and subsequent domination of the surrounding seas inhibited enslavement through capture in raids. A rise in population perhaps encouraged Norman overlords to have their demesnes farmed by free labor in return for rents and services, rather than by slaves who had to be fed daily. Foreign landowners, furthermore, probably had little grasp of the outsider status of slaves and instead regarded those on their estates in terms of occupational function rather than legal status. The institution was almost extinct by the end of the reign of Henry I [in 1135].

 

[chris epic]

If he or she who you're attacking stands a good chance of eviscerating you or ripping your throat out, you're far less likely to try to impose your will on them.

That's an improper analogy. There are many animals that are stronger, larger and more ferocious than we humans are...but we have zoos- they didn't seem to eviscerate us when we put them in there. And if we're dealing with a warewolf- part beast part man, we have things like shot guns and swords to combat them. Just like someone was saying that this stuff happens in the animal kingdom- stronger wolves oppressing weaker ones- the utilization of power is a natural thing.

Slavery was different in many parts of the world over history- mind you, it was all wrong- but back then two of the most important factors that justified it was tradition and economy. However, that didn't mean there was a code of ethics. One really good example was the Hebrews- even though they had a long history of slavery and captivity, they still had slavery as apart of their infrastructure, but they were still sympathetic. Every 7 years the slave had the opportunity to chose to go free or stay with their masters. Would you believe more times than not they chose the latter? That's because they had a far better life than they would if they were free...or so they thought

 

[chris epic]

Interesting thought. There's a saying that runs something like, "Those who beat their swords into plowshares will plow for those who don't."

There's another that goes, "When the lion and the lamb lie down together, neither will arise hungry."

You have to do a little stretching to make them fit the context of the conversation, but they're not entirely inappropriate.

I like the first scripture- the second is pushing it- completely unrelavent. Have you ever seen a lion and a lamb lie down together? Neither have I, because the lion ate the lamb

 

[Beady]

Have you ever seen a lion and a lamb lie down together? Neither have I, because the lion ate the lamb

It's in reference to an allegory from the Old Testament:

Isaiah 11:6
The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them.

 

[chris epic]

It's in reference to an allegory from the Old Testament:

Isaiah 11:6
The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them.

I know they were both scriptures- you could have come out and said that in the first place

 

[chris epic]

I know they were both scriptures- you could have come out and said that in the first place

plus- thats comming from the same book where Isaiah or Elijah (one of those guys) used the power god gave him to kill a bunch of children with bears all because they taunted him

 

[the_bgma]

A comment on this exact thing, from Appendix A.

*****

Q. Why do you argue for an underlying base morality? Morals are a human construct, and vary by society. How do you reconcile your position with the fact that seeing a woman’s leg uncovered is immoral in many parts of the world, while it is acceptable in the United States; and that seeing a woman without a shirt is immoral in the United States, but it is acceptable in parts of Europe? Doesn’t this prove that morals are all relative?



A. What we have is a difference in definition. Although we commonly use the word “moral” to describe things such as community standards of decency, I would define those as “cultural norms” instead. Cultural norms such as standards of acceptable clothing are indeed relative, and vary widely. But morals do not. Many people confuse the two because we sometimes see people who are willing to cross the boundaries of both cultural norms and morality, and wrongly paint any people who break cultural norms as immoral. Also, sometimes cultural norms intrude where we run into the gray area at the edge of morality. How much harm do things like drugs inflict on a society, is it better to ban them and jail users, or to legalize them? There are completely moral reasons for both solutions, so cultural norms come into play. How accepting is the culture of the use of such drugs?

Sometimes cultural norms themselves fall afoul of basic morality without there being two moral sides to the issue, such as slavery and racism in the past in the U.S., or currently with bride burnings in India and honor rapes and killings in Muslim societies. But as societies mature, such acts begin to earn condemnation, and eventually are removed from the list of cultural norms. Slavery has been removed from the United States as a cultural norm. Racism in the U.S. and bride burnings in India are strongly condemned, although they occur occasionally. Honor rapes and killings in Muslim societies still occur, although there is now increased awareness of the problem. Human societies are in various stages of moving their cultural norms to conform with the true morality of sympathy for others. Yes, at times we take steps backwards, such as in Nazi Germany. But as a species, overall we continue to move forwards.

*****


******************************************
The Bible of the Good and Moral Atheist

 

[strathmeyer]

Slavery isn't much different than paying minimum wage.

Not any more than telling someone if they aren't worth being paid a certain salary, they shouldn't be allowed to work.

 

[Beady]

Human societies are in various stages of moving their cultural norms to conform with the true morality of sympathy for others.

How do you know this is "true" morality? How do you know that it is moral?