Topics Ethics

Question Most people believe that if slavery were universally accepted, it would still be wrong. But let's suppose that, contrary to our beliefs, slavery is actually morally acceptable. Would anything be different? Surely the physical laws would be the same. Sodium would still bond with chlorine, and earth would still pull at 9.8 Newtons per kilogram. And according to the first statement, societies views do not have a casual relationship with morality. So when someone says slavery is wrong, what exactly are they asserting?

Accepted:
September 18, 2008

Comments

The feat of imagination here isn't quite as straightforward as it seems. Do the slaves have the same basic capacities as the slaveholders? Would the slaves vastly prefer not to be slaves? Would the slaveholders really, genuinely agree, after thinking it through, that had luck turned out so that they had been in the wrong place at the wrong time, or been born into families of slaves, it would be perfectly acceptable for them to have been enslaved? Is the practice of slaveholding generally bad for the slaves? Does it generally make their lives much more painful, fear-filled and miserable than the lives of the slaveholders?

You get the drift. What makes slavery wrong, so the story would go, are various facts of the sort that the rhetorical questions above point to. In some times and places, people may have been ignorant of those facts, or may have lulled themselves into ignoring them. But chances are that anyone who was prepared to offer a defense of slavery would end up saying a bunch of things that are just flat-out false. (That members of the enslaved group are mentally defective, or don't feel pain in the way that "we" do, for example.) Chances are, in other words, that anyone who really believes that slavery is acceptable also gets a lot of important facts wrong. The thought experiment of keeping the actual facts constant and adding the extra assumption that nonetheless, slavery is acceptable is very hard to pull off. I'll confess that I can't do it.

Spelling out a detailed story of the relationship between moral facts and non-moral facts is a big job. But whatever the detailed story turns out to be, it's not at all clear that right and wrong could possibly float free of the non-moral facts in the way that your thought-experiment requires.