(Oct 29, 2018 04:28 PM)Syne Wrote:(Oct 22, 2018 03:07 AM)Secular Sanity Wrote: It's wrong now and it was wrong then.
(Oct 29, 2018 01:30 PM)Leigha Wrote: It's not that people of different time periods didn't know better, they did know better, and either didn't care, or were too afraid to change laws.
Good. It sounds like there's at least a few here who believe in a universal morality that transcends culture or time.
Not surprising that online pockets of people with an anti-metaphysical or scientism bent (via whatever lingering past or persisting -isms) may often be reluctant to explore or clarify what they mean by advocating spreading the net of an _X_ over all eras of time and place on Earth.
Given the ubiquitous nature of slavery throughout human history (even in the isolated New World[*]), potential attempts to ground modern antipathy toward it in genetics (so as to make it globally repugnant) would seem to be a fail. That leaves the kind of situation Winston was in as a captive of O'Brien (addressing a different species of bondage and its overthrow):
“Do you believe in God, Winston?”
“No.”
“Then what is it, this principle that will defeat us [the Party]?”
“I don’t know. The spirit of Man.” --1984
IOW, if Winston or someone in his particular pickle aren't alternatively falling back on an outright appeal to common folk traditions of the occult -- then at least apparently making a hand waving appeal at some idealized, Platonic level of potent principles which have significance to the human societal domain; or Kant's transcendental version of the mind, with its set of thought-forms, faculties, and moral standard distributed universally to rational agents (as if a Windows OS).
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[*] Slavery of children in Latin America continues; and of course today's political pop-market orientation infectiously attributes the original source of that solely to Spanish colonialism. But slavery also already existed in pre-Columbian populations, including parents voluntarily selling children to priests for the most powerful human sacrifices of innocence (captive of war-like raids certainly weren't the only source).
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