Is Slavery Wrong?

@Aedes,

Aedes;93614 wrote:

Did I say that?

No.

Respond to what I actually said or don't respond at all.

Don't respond at all? So I can only respond to what you say? Well I was responding to how you seem to imply that complaining about your work is petty compared to someone having to undergo a death march. It is what you don't say sometimes that says more than what you actually say. To me it sounded like you were trying to shut him up. Just like this response you made to me. "or don't respond at all."

@Aedes,

How about I post an original thread concerning metaphor, metymony, and synechdotes in reference to emotionally charged issues. Because it seems that my comment is out of place here.

@GoshisDead,

So are we debating the definition of slavery or if its effects are abusive and wrong ? It is an emotional word and if we are to debate the modern slave in the work place as opposed to what i would perceive as real slavery, then so be it, but it appears a rather trivial debate.

@Zetherin,

Zetherin;93387 wrote:

I feel that's different than the traditional use of the word "slavery" which involves possession, the perception that a person is a commodity. I know one could argue this is slavery, in some sense, but it's definitely not the slavery Lincoln was referencing, for example.

Personally, I agree with you. If they're going to be locked up for that much time, might as well have them work, do something productive.

Indeed, but that was an answer to the comment of that no one should be "put on bondages", what I understood as "locked up".

GoshisDead;93390 wrote:

Slavery seems to me the position of being in a situation without hope. One can be a slave in the traditional sense one can also be a slave to an addiction, or an obligation. If in your mind there is no hope to avoid the onerous, degrading, or demeaning you have become a slave as all viable/percievable options to avoid it have been removed.

I disagree, a slave always has chances of escaping, albeit slim, and he is not winhout choice: he can chose death over slavehood.

Fido;93426 wrote:

People should never have to ask if their laws are just, and when they reach that point it is because their laws have long been unjust, and supporting injustice...Law is a certain form, and as with all forms, good must come out of it; or its days are numbered..If the people cannot change failed forms the failed forms will kill them... Civilizations fall with their failed forms... Slavery sucked the life out of Greece, and Rome, out of Russia, and the South...The form does not lift up people, and demand the best of each for a common good...It degrades humanity to an animal existence...

Justice is relative, what one sees as just other may see as unjust. People will, thus, always consider certain laws unfair. Personally I even think seeking justice is foolish, it is better to seek a confortable situation for all involved.

As far as I know:

Greece fell because the different greek citties fought each other out of rivality until the macedonians used the opportunity to conquer then.

Rome fell because it over-expanded and... dont remember the specifics, but I dont think it was related to slavery at all.

Russia (I believe you mean socialism here) fell because the government forgot about food, or something like it.

The South fell because it lost the war, not because slavery eat it from the inside.

As you can see my memory sucks. I also forgot who was the guy with an history major, whoever it is, feel free to correct me =)

Aedes;93433 wrote:

Can the Court throw out a constitutional amendment, by the way? I don't know the answer to this one...

Dont know anything about american laws, but if new amendments overpower previous law, then it doesnt seens really relevant... there is also the fact that having laws that can never be changed would be absurd, and, were that the legal rule, it would be changed even through ilegality =)

NoOne;93497 wrote:

I only hope to "make" a friend if it is an intelligent young female with a desire to help save man from himself while adding to the population crisis. j.c.

Yeah, the possible hypocrisy of having children then there are too many people in the world also bothers me =)

And... good life plan there =)

William;93523 wrote:

If I might offer, how do you "make a friend"?

As far as I know, "make a friend", and its translation into portuguese, are expressions that mean "befriend", or, being clearer, "form a friendship with somebody". there is no verb for the act of befriending in portuguese, so we use verbs with meanings similar to "do" to express that.

Fido;93579 wrote:

Oh; Come on....You either rate your rights too highly or rate those of a slave to low...Consider, that there were slave who worked their way to freedom... Even in Rome the state had to tax owners for the slaves they freed, and made eligable for the corn dole, a sort of slave retirement for the non productive... Do you really believe that those people did not lament their fate, or the condition of their lives only because they did not have computers??? The crime is that so much later in time we are still giving luck or fate or faith the credit for our success and failure in life... We have no more authority in our own affairs than the common slave, and our existence is no more secure...Like them we go from day to day wishing our lives away until we wake up one day and find they are all gone...I wish tomorrow would get here...I wish payday some haste...I wish quiting time would hurry, I wish I wasn't so late...I wish the boss would climb out of my ass and treat me like I have so class...I wish my life were not harried and harassed from end to end...Oh...Ya; we are free...

You may be as depressed as a slave, I have no ways of knowing, but, still, you have way more options of how to get out of the hellhole than a slave does =)

Krumple;93622 wrote:

Don't respond at all? So I can only respond to what you say? Well I was responding to how you seem to imply that complaining about your work is petty compared to someone having to undergo a death march. It is what you don't say sometimes that says more than what you actually say. To me it sounded like you were trying to shut him up. Just like this response you made to me. "or don't respond at all."

What he means with that response to your comment is that you are putting words on his post, what you indeed are. there are many possible interpretations to his comment, if he said that, it means you made a wrong one.

xris;93630 wrote:

So are we debating the definition of slavery or if its effects are abusive and wrong ? It is an emotional word and if we are to debate the modern slave in the work place as opposed to what i would perceive as real slavery, then so be it, but it appears a rather trivial debate.

We are philosophers, the people in the world who suck the most at sticking to the thread =)

Besides, there doesnt seen to be much to debate about actual slavery here, since everone agrees that it sucks and its bad, so we just end up discussing what is slavery instead, and what can or can not be called so.

I will make a little push back towards the thread though: The question is if slavery is wrong... everone seens to agree yes. So I ask: What is, in your opinion, the thing most similar to slavehood that is still acceptable. That may include forms of slavehood more humane than those we know.

I already answered that question myself: I think slavery stops being bad then the people are being slaved for their own good, rather than for the good of the master.

@prothero,

GoshisDead;93623 wrote:

How about I post an original thread concerning metaphor, metymony, and synechdotes in reference to emotionally charged issues. Because it seems that my comment is out of place here.

I think that would be a very interesting topic!

Krumple;93622 wrote:

I was responding to how you seem to imply that complaining about your work is petty compared to someone having to undergo a death march.

I didn't imply that. I said it outright. What I didn't say is what you paraphrased me as saying.

Krumple;93622 wrote:

It is what you don't say sometimes that says more than what you actually say.

Well, sometimes what you don't say is simply what you don't say.

Krumple;93622 wrote:

To me it sounded like you were trying to shut him up.

No, I was trying to get him to justify how he can juxtapose the aches and pains of normal life on earth with the suffering of slavery.

Krumple;93622 wrote:

Just like this response you made to me.

Well, in your case it was because of the discourtesy of misrepresenting what I said and railing off on it. Feel free to ask for clarification if you think I'm implying something else.

@prothero,

From Wikipedia "God is Dead"
Nietzsche recognizes the crisis which the death of God represents for existing moral considerations, because "When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one's feet. This morality is by no means self-evident... By breaking one main concept out of Christianity, the faith in God, one breaks the whole: nothing necessary remains in one's hands."[1] This is why in "The Madman", a work which primarily addresses atheists, the problem is to retain any system of values in the absence of a divine order.

The death of God is a way of saying that humans are no longer able to believe in any such cosmic order since they themselves no longer recognize it. The death of God will lead, Nietzsche says, not only to the rejection of a belief of cosmic or physical order but also to a rejection of absolute values themselves - to the rejection of belief in an objective and universal moral law, binding upon all individuals. In this manner, the loss of an absolute basis for morality leads to nihilism. This nihilism is what Nietzsche worked to find a solution for by re-evaluating the foundations of human values. This meant, to Nietzsche, looking for foundations that went deeper than Christian values. He would find a basis in the "will to power" that he described as "the essence of reality."

Nietzsche believed that the majority of people did not recognize (or refused to acknowledge) this death out of the deepest-seated fear or angst. Therefore, when the death did begin to become widely acknowledged, people would despair and nihilism would become rampant End of Wikipedia.

In a world where there is no belief in a divine transcendent what is the basis for ethics and aesthetics?

Is there any way to avoid the notion that morality is simply a social consensus?

Does anyone truly wish to defend the notion that slavery (US civil war style) was moral and just for that society? I picked slavery precisely because it was an "ethical concept" on which one could get almost universal agreement.

The notion of human rights and human dignity origianlly arose out of the religious notion of "man created in the image of god". When one removes the religious motivation or understanding what now becomes the basis for continuing belief in "human rights"? "all men are endowed by their creator with certain inaleianable rights" implies both a creator and the concept of natural law.

I have the notion "the intuition" that slavery is wrong, was wrong, will always be wrong,. That opposition to slavery is a transcendent moral intuition.
Where does this notion "slavery is wrong and immoral, always"come from?

It does not come solely from reason. When I apply reason to the problem morals or ethics seem to be merely social conventions or cultural preferences or conditiong.

It does not come from "science" because science seems like a value neutral process. Science creates nuclear, chemical and biological weapsons as readily as it does cures for cancer or missions to the moon.

One could argue that "empathy or compassion " is an evolutionary derived perception and that morality and ethics are arrived at by evolutionary conditioned behaviors. The same argument works for aesthetics and ethics.

So opposition to slavery is almost universal but on what basis without religion without any justification for eternal, universal and transcendent value?

@prothero,

Why do morals have to be absolutely justified? Why isn't it enough to see ourselves in other people? As you'll find if you read that article I linked for you, people generally make snap moral judgements and then back-rationalize them, rather than deriving them from some reasoned approach.

@Aedes,

Aedes;93742 wrote:

Why do morals have to be absolutely justified? Why isn't it enough to see ourselves in other people? As you'll find if you read that article I linked for you, people generally make snap moral judgements and then back-rationalize them, rather than deriving them from some reasoned approach.

Well I did read the article. My take was that there is an "intuitive morality" which holds up across many cultural lines. No it does not hold up to rational or logical analysis.

I am happy with the notion that the "golden rule" is an intuitive moral prinicple. I do not care if one views that moral principle as being derived from evolutionary process or from transcendent revelation since for me the two are compatible.

I simply object to the notion that morality is entirely relative or the result of science and reason. At best science and reason lead to cultural relativism if not nihilism when pushed to their logical conclusions.

I belong to Schopenhauers compassion is the basis of morality not Nietzsche's reason or will is the basis of morality.

@prothero,

Morality can't be 100% relative since there is a large degree of cross-cultural consistency.

And just because science can systematically describe how and when people make certain moral judgements, that would be true regardless of what judgements are made. So science (and reason) don't produce moral judgements -- they simply help us understand them.

I agree that compassion (empathy, really) is the basis of morality.

To make arguments in which the trials and tribulations of normal life level are presented as equivalent to the suffering of abject slavery seems to be a complete and total repudiation of moral judgements -- even of the possibility of them. How do you make moral judgements if having to pay taxes or having a mean boss is morally equivalent to forced labor? Isn't there some sort of scale?

@prothero,

prothero wrote:

I simply object to the notion that morality is entirely relative or the result of science and reason.

How could morality be the result of science or logic (reason), when science and logic are methods which are used to evaluate after the fact?

Quote:

At best science and reason lead to cultural relativism if not nihilism when pushed to their logical conclusions.

Logic is essentially a method used in order to demonstrate correct reasoning. When it comes to constructing valid, logical arguments, we must keep in mind it's just as easy to construct one regarding matters of morality as it is with other topics which are considered less subjective in nature. Whether one agrees or finds the argument sound is an entirely different story, but a valid, logical argument can be made nonetheless.

Now, I'm sure you've read, or at least heard of, some of the ethical arguments out there, so it comes as a surprise to me when you say that at best logical arguments only come to nihilism or cultural relativism. This is just demonstrably untrue. And the reason why it's untrue is not simply because people have created valid, logical arguments with regards to morality which involve compassion, but because logic, more than a method, is an art form. One can make a valid, logical argument about practically anything, and it's essentially up to the artist to make the values fit logically, all in an effort to demonstrate correct reasoning. And even if a valid, logical argument is considered sound by the majority, keep in mind there's nothing in logic which states logic is correct. As artists, we've dubbed the argument to have correct reasoning. That's the beauty of it all, but also why we should never make the mistake to pit logic or science against morality, as if they're diametrical opposites. They're really more similar than we make them out to be.

@prothero,

prothero;93683 wrote:

I have the notion "the intuition" that slavery is wrong, was wrong, will always be wrong,. That opposition to slavery is a transcendent moral intuition.
Where does this notion "slavery is wrong and immoral, always"come from?

It does not come solely from reason. When I apply reason to the problem morals or ethics seem to be merely social conventions or cultural preferences or conditiong.

It does not come from "science" because science seems like a value neutral process. Science creates nuclear, chemical and biological weapsons as readily as it does cures for cancer or missions to the moon.

One could argue that "empathy or compassion " is an evolutionary derived perception and that morality and ethics are arrived at by evolutionary conditioned behaviors. The same argument works for aesthetics and ethics.

So opposition to slavery is almost universal but on what basis without religion without any justification for eternal, universal and transcendent value?

Good points. I think morality derives from evolved behaviors and some logical conclusions along with beliefs. We evolved to care for others so that we are cared for in return, through thinking, we make conclusions such as "I must not throw garbage on the streets because it would be unnaceptable if all did so, and I cannot have this right above others" wich were lead by that part of caring and sharing resources with others. And we conclude that is unnaceptable through several ideas, such as that piles of garbage are bad, garbage is bad for health, etc.

Aedes;93742 wrote:

Why do morals have to be absolutely justified? Why isn't it enough to see ourselves in other people? As you'll find if you read that article I linked for you, people generally make snap moral judgements and then back-rationalize them, rather than deriving them from some reasoned approach.

Absolute justification means that you not only can, but also must, impose it upon others.

@manored,

manored;93791 wrote:

Absolute justification means that you not only can, but also must, impose it upon others.

Isn't that a different moral?

Doing X is absolutely justified.
Imposing X on others is absolutely justified.

I think these are different ideas.

@prothero,

manored wrote:

Absolute justification means that you not only can, but also must, impose it upon others.

Can you give me an example? I don't think I've heard of such a thing. Something that must be imposed upon others? Do you mean must from a legal standpoint, like that murder is generally considered unlawful (a moral imposed, I guess)?

If not, what exactly do you mean?

---------- Post added 09-26-2009 at 10:21 PM ----------

Zetherin wrote:

That's the beauty of it all, but also why we should never make the mistake to pit logic or science against morality, as if they're diametrical opposites. They're really more similar than we make them out to be.

I just wanted to clarify this part of my post earlier because I think it's a bit muddy.

What I mean is that we should acknowledge that moral arguments can be just as logical as any argument. That is, they can and should be perceived to hold just as much credibility as any other type of argument can. I've witnessed a habit of people judging arguments by their content, dismissing those arguments which contain ideas or concepts which do not hold definitive ontological properties. When this happens, we begin only valuing those things which are scientific in nature, those things which are considered of "reason" (I use this term as a category describer). People then begin denying those things dealing with the human condition, such as morality, with the belief that they are unimportant or meaningless concepts. This is a problem.

---------- Post added 09-26-2009 at 10:24 PM ----------

Aedes wrote:

Isn't that a different moral?

Doing X is absolutely justified.
Imposing X on others is absolutely justified.

I think these are different ideas.

I'm not clear how you're using "absolutely" here. Could we not just say "justified"? Doing X is justified. Imposing X on others is justified.

@Zetherin,

Zetherin;93814 wrote:

I'm not clear how you're using "absolutely" here. Could we not just say "justified"? Doing X is justified. Imposing X on others is justified.

Well, this was in response to manored's post. Let's say absolutely justified by the will of god. Does "god says you must do X" equate to "god wants you to impel others to do X"? I don't believe that's true -- I mean who believes that you should force others to confess?

@Aedes,

Aedes;93610 wrote:

Again -- cry me a river. My grandfather was on a death march and was forced at gunpoint to stack and burn bodies. But you have a mean boss, oh the humanity.

Maybe you would be so kind as to show me half a justice, or half a morality...Your defense of injustice for others, in this case, for me is the best defense of the injustice your grandfather experienced...Do you really think all injustice is so many separate incidences... How then could the phenomenon be named, classified, conceived...All injustice is a single thing, and our willingness to accept it when it benefits us demeans our complaint of that part we suffer... We should all complain, and demand justice for all, and liberty too; for in this land those are the ideas we were formed to achieve...

@Fido,

Fido;93985 wrote:

All injustice is a single thing

Stealing a dollar from someone is not equally unjust as kidnapping their child. To have a system of morality requires that you have a way of weighing importance.

@Aedes,

Aedes;93869 wrote:

Well, this was in response to manored's post. Let's say absolutely justified by the will of god. Does "god says you must do X" equate to "god wants you to impel others to do X"? I don't believe that's true -- I mean who believes that you should force others to confess?

I would be willing to bet without so much as a thourough study of any religion, that all religions have their forms and formulas; and we can say that some are very formal while some are more informal, but that all have their forms...So step inside, and bless yourself with holy water, and pray it is not the pee Davy replaced the holy water with... People go through the motions... We do it as well in our societies and in our whole lives...Do we justify what we do??? Always...Injustice is always justified...It is what we do, as a verb, since it stands to reason that every just act is just on its face, and needs no justification from us...I know that when I find myself justifying any action to myself that I am mired, and looking for some lever to raise me above my actions...I have been reading a small book about all the people the Nazis killed, and being the reasonable people that they were, they had their justifications... Do you think any of them could face the reality that they did as they enjoyed, and that all the reason in the world could not make them moral, because morality is unreasonable???

@Fido,

Fido;93989 wrote:

Do you think any of them could face the reality that they did as they enjoyed, and that all the reason in the world could not make them moral, because morality is unreasonable???

I think a lot of them came to terms with that, because almost none of them ever truly apologized after the war. They just lived their lives continuing to justify themselves or to deny responsibility (rather than insisting that they were right).

@Aedes,

Aedes;93987 wrote:

Stealing a dollar from someone is not equally unjust as kidnapping their child. To have a system of morality requires that you have a way of weighing importance.

There you are wrong...Each is unjust, and the Idea, the form, the identity: Unjust, means they are equal...You are equal to your identity... What is not the same is the damage the injustice causes, and it is the damage that causes people to say: more unjust...Or a greater injustice... The greatness or the leastness of the thing is a subjective judgement based upon effect...Well the fact is we lie about many of our actions and speak cant always... We hate violence, because we fear its effects... But we do not think of a child starving to death as violence because it is not sudden... What if starving a child to death could be judged violent not on it speed, but upon its intent??? Do you think children die of starvation because no one intends it??? People know when they steal a dollar, and another, and another, and all others use the theivery of one to justify their own action that sooner or later, people, real people will be denied their lives for want of money with which to purchace the stuff of life...We turn our backs on injustice, and try to regulate the worst effects without coming to terms with the cause...It is for this reason that law is such a failure... Punish the guilty, and the innocent have not been turned away from their paths... Make people fear the consequences of a single violent action, and you have not made them want to resist the curse of injustice in the only place it might be resisted, before the act, and within the soul of the person... No; instead, we encourage injustice when we honor wealth without demanding that it be earned with honor, and so, with wealth the equal of honor we all but ensure that the innocent should suffer and some will die...

@Fido,

Fido;93993 wrote:

There you are wrong...Each is unjust, and the Idea, the form, the identity: Unjust, means they are equal...

I happen to hold Plato in great esteem as an intellectual and literary figure. I also happen to think that his forms / ideas are ludicrous. So if that's the basis of your argument, then I can't even step over the threshold with you.

---------- Post added 09-27-2009 at 11:43 PM ----------

Fido;93993 wrote:

The greatness or the leastness of the thing is a subjective judgement based upon effect...

Even if that is true, it's the basis of weighing one example of injustice against another and thus the basis of morality. To say they're the same because they share the word injustice is just a semantic smokescreen.

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