Topics Ethics

Question Following a class discussion of Augustine's position on slavery, a student in my Ancient Political Theory class made the claim that slavery was essentially good and necessary for the United States. When I began to think about all the ways to refute this claim, I came across another question: "Can slavery be morally justified?"

Accepted:
November 12, 2005

Comments

No, it can't be morally justified.

Frankly, that's all that really need be said. Indeed, I must say I find asking the question today in a serious way to itself be morally unjustifiable. It suggests a kind of negligence with regard to learning about the moral accomplishments of our civilzation, or perhaps a debasement of our moral fiber. I suppose it's like asking whether genocide can be justified or whether torture and secret detention without review, trial, or warrant can be justified (!). So, to be charitable, I must conclude that you're really not asking this question in a serious way but, rather, as a kind of intellectual exercise. Briefly, then, let me suggest why slavery can't be justified by some of the central ethical frameworks philosophers have developed:

1. Virtue ethics. Slavery (as it was practiced in North America and the Carribean by Europeans--Roman slavery might have a slightly different inflection here) can't be justified since it inhibits development of the excellences and perfections of slaves, slaveholders, and slave traders. Among slaves it inhibits the develop ment of intellectual excellences through denying them intellectual education and cutting them off from their cultures, customs, and traditions; it inhibits moral excellence through denying them education, disrupting family relationships and friendships, denying them the capacity to realize themselves through their labor, cutting them off from their cultures, customs, traditions, and religions, disrupting and poisoning their home societies in Africa, teaching them to disimulate, undermining their dignity, teachiing them that they're by nature inferior, subjecting them to the traumas of sadism, rape, and dispossession etc. It inhibits the intellectual development of slave owners and traders by rendering the wisdom of the enslaved cultures as something not worthy of investigation or consideration. It inhibits the moral development of slavers by developing characters prone to intemperance and sadism, unable to sympathize with other human beings; it teaches the propriety of dominion, oppression, hierarchy inequality, privilege based on power, the objectification and exploitation of other humans; it denies them the ability to realize themselves through their labor, etc.

2. Kantian ethics. Slavery inhibits the development of autonomy among slaves and undermines its value among slavers. It treats other people as mere means rather than as ends in themselves. It's a practice that cannot be universalized. It does not encourage the development of respect.

3. Utilitarianism. As an institution, the net result of slavery is a diminishment of happiness and a magnification of suffering.

4. Care. North American slavery presents a pretty good example of the opposite of care, not to mention love, and compassion.

5. Political philosophy: "Liberty, fraternity [community], and equality"--the principles of the French Revolution. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights"--the Declaration of Independence. The social contract, with its requirement of "consent" of the governed. Slavery is inconsistent with all this.

In what ways was it essential, good, and necessary? In no ways that I can see. It is true that wealth would not be distributed in the United States today in the way it is and that racism wouldn't exist in the way it does, if we hadn't endured slavery. How much better off we might be if that were the case. Slavery was and remains a pathological dimension of our polity.

Fiinally, I'm sure you noted this in class, but for Augustine, slavery is unjustifiable, too. It is the result and symptom of sin: See, for example, Chapter 15 of City of God, "Of the Liberty Proper to Man's Nature and the Servitude Introduced by Sin": There Augustine writes, "He [God] did not intend that His rational creature, who was made in His image, should have dominion over anything but the irrational creation -- not man over man, but man over the beasts. And hence the righteous men in primitive times were made shepherds of cattle rather than kings of men, God intending thus to teach us what the relative position of the creatures is, and what the desert of sin; for it is with justice, we believe, that the condition of slavery is the result of sin. And this is why we do not find the word 'slave' in any part of Scripture until righteous Noah branded the sin of his son with this name. It is a name, therefore, introduced by sin and not by nature." Also note that Augustine regards being ruled by one's appetites a kind of slavery. To the extent Augustine has any deferential remarks about slavery, my understanding is that it's in regard to impossibility of getting rid of it without enormous social disruption. One might say, I suppose, that the US Civil War proves his point.