Slavery

[FlashDangerpants]

That's a long story.
Experience suggests you want to be fed in McNuggets and will reject anything else as overcomplicated.
So there's not much likelihood of this working out.

Oh, I'm sure, with your vast wisdom and mighty intellect (not to mention your infinite patience), you could find some way to educate a man with my obvious limitations.

Please, tell me why slavery is wrong.

It's wrong under the terms of normal moral reasoning as applied by all people I would ever consider moral peers. Which way you conduct that reasoning can be arranged in many ways. But any time that somebody says today that a good slave ought to perform his slavely duties to the very best of his ability, which is the sort of thing Socrates and Jesus might have said, we would reject that person as a moral peer. That includes you, me, cin and more or less anybody else, even though we do our stated moral reasoning very differently from each other.

The act of reasoning, in any domain, comes with a surface level of expressed statements arranged in organised form, which is the only bit that laymen ever think about... and an underlying set of motives and assumptions that define what makes sense in that context. Moral philosophy is difficult because it mostly happens in that second area which is murky to say the least.

I'll offer one example. One of the main purposes of morality is predictability. As social animals we want to know what reactions to expect of one another, it's very important to all that transacting that you enjoy so much, transacting becomes difficult if you don't know how the other guy is thinking and what he is thinking about doing. The scope of morality isn't just about murder rape and slavery, it meanders off into manners, codes and convention. In all of these areas, anything that is surprising automatically acquires the quality of wrongness at least for those of a conservative disposition.

I would like to point out in advance that I absolutely did not just make a claim that slavery is wrong because it is surprising. Anybody tempted to hit reply and make such an assertion is incapable of reading and will be treated as an imbecile.

[MikeNovack]

I would like to point out in advance that I absolutely did not just make a claim that slavery is wrong because it is surprising. Anybody tempted to hit reply and make such an assertion is incapable of reading and will be treated as an imbecile.

LOL. As one who has the same problem with material I post being taken entirely out of context, not sure how effective this warning will be. But I think it s more matter of "blindness" than being imbeciles.

BTW -- I am prepared to argue that "slavery" cannot (should not) be defined in terms of "property". Too easy to give examples where the relationship A owns B (B is a slave of A) is not a transferable right (A cannot sell/transfer ownership to any C). << I suggest the religious here read the Bible >>

[CIN2]

Usually bad could mean occasionally good , yes?

Yes. You could have a society in which the rich keep slaves and look after them well, while the free people who are poor are starving.

Also, what's the measure of bad? Just physical discomfort or deprivation? Some folks choose spare, harsh, living but would take a dim view of such living being forced on them.

Other things can be bad, e.g. grief and depression.

If you have physical discomfort forced on you, you have two unpleasantnesses at once: the unpleasantness of the discomfort, and the unpleasantness of having it forced on you. If you choose the physical discomfort yourself, you have one unpleasantness — the unpleasantness of the physical discomfort — and one pleasantness — the pleasantness of feeling free to make your own choices.

People usually seem to think that being free is good in itself. I don’t think that’s true, I think it’s just that for most humans, feeling free is pleasant, and feeling unfree is unpleasant. It’s not just humans that feel that, a lot of animals do too.

[Impenitent]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJktf4aTNvk

...I can walk down the street, there's no one there
Though the pavements are one huge crowd
I can drive down the road, my eyes don't see
Though my mind wants to cry out loud
I feel free...

-Imp

[CIN2]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJktf4aTNvk

...I can walk down the street, there's no one there
Though the pavements are one huge crowd
I can drive down the road, my eyes don't see
Though my mind wants to cry out loud
I feel free...

-Imp

Exactly (and BTW, excellent taste in music).

[Iwannaplato]

Please, tell me why slavery is wrong.

Because it diminishes and undermines the abilities, self-confidence, strength and intelligence of the slave-owners. They become dependent, just like any receiver of welfare, on the work of others. The moment they own a slave, they start atrophying and slide towards decadence at best.

[Gary Childress]

Please, tell me why slavery is wrong.

Because it diminishes and undermines the abilities, self-confidence, strength and intelligence of the slave-owners. They become dependent, just like any receiver of welfare, on the work of others. The moment they own a slave, they start atrophying and slide towards decadence at best.

Good point.

[Immanuel Can]

Please, tell me why slavery is wrong.

Because it diminishes and undermines the abilities, self-confidence, strength and intelligence of the slave-owners. They become dependent, just like any receiver of welfare, on the work of others. The moment they own a slave, they start atrophying and slide towards decadence at best.

Good point.

The case is a little hard to make, though.

For example, apparently one of the reasons black slaves were preferred in the early South of the States was because of their inherited resistance to malaria, which made them better able to survive exposure to swampy farming conditions. It's not apparent that such a slave-owner would be "atrophying" or "sliding to decadence" in avoiding labour that was likely to issue in his sickness and death. So you'd have to convince him that the detriments on his character of sending slaves into the field was worse than getting sick and dying himself. And I think you'd find that a hard sell. Given secularism, and given his interests in having a slave are very practical, and your objections are only moral (which, as a secularist, he has to believe are delusory anyway) why should he believe you?

I recognize the argument, though...where did you get it from? I think I just read a similar bit from somewhere. I even remember somebody trying to sell the view that being a slave made one wiser, more perceptive and more in-control than the master...as I recall, because the slave is supposed to understand both the conditions of freedom and of oppression, wereas the master is only supposed to know freedom -- a clever bit of sophistry, to be sure, but not a case that's likely to be believed, I think, and not one that will encourage any of us to seek to become slaves in pursuit of epistemic privilege of that sort.