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Was slavery always wrong?

#11
Magical Realist Offline
Quote:Many former slaves did become slave owners, as that's the only way to become wealthy in a slave economy.

No..just a few exceptions---sell outs actually-- out of millions of slaves. Anybody can find an exception if they look hard enough. It proves nothing.

Quote:So you are obviously viewing history through a lens of presentism and likely only thinking of American slavery...where African, Roman, etc. slavery were often of the same race.

No..I made no such distinction. Slavery any time anywhere, regardless of the race of the slaveowners. The vast majority of slaves were anti-slavery. And that destroys your thesis that slavery was universally accepted.
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#12
Syne Offline
(Oct 22, 2018 04:15 AM)Magical Realist Wrote:
Quote:Many former slaves did become slave owners, as that's the only way to become wealthy in a slave economy.

No..just a few exceptions---sell outs actually-- out of millions of slaves. Anybody can find an exception if they look hard enough. It proves nothing.

Quote:So you are obviously viewing history through a lens of presentism and likely only thinking of American slavery...where African, Roman, etc. slavery were often of the same race.

No..I made no such distinction. Slavery any time anywhere, regardless of the race of the slaveowners. The vast majority of slaves were anti-slavery. And that destroys your thesis that slavery was universally accepted.

It was relatively few in America, where obvious anti-slavery sentiment had already been brewing.

The census of 1830 lists 3,775 free Negroes who owned a total of 12,760 slaves.
- https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/facts-about-slavery/

About 28 percent of the free black population in New Orleans at the time owned slaves, with at least six owning 65 or more.
- http://listverse.com/2017/06/06/top-10-b...aveowners/


But that doesn't include the slavery in Africa, that existed since the Roman empire and facilitated the western slave trade.

How did slaves make it to these coastal forts? The historians John Thornton and Linda Heywood of Boston University estimate that 90 percent of those shipped to the New World were enslaved by Africans and then sold to European traders. The sad truth is that without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents, the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible, at least on the scale it occurred.
- https://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/23/opinion/23gates.html


And if you truly take a look at when slavery was the most normalized, freedmen (where even just allowed to be freed) slave owners were not rare.

But we do hear of many ex-slaves eventually becoming independent and even wealthy. The famous playwright Terence had been a slave, for example. Often freedmen opened stores, or ran small businesses. Sometimes they bought farms. Many freedmen owned slaves themselves. And some freedmen actually got pensions from their former owners. Pliny the Younger bought a small farm for his old nanny to retire to.

During the Julio-Claudian period, some of the most powerful men in the empire were actually freedmen. Sejanus is one example. The emperors felt they could trust these men more than they could trust senators and other rich men they knew.
- https://quatr.us/romans/roman-freedmen-s...t-rome.htm

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#13
RainbowUnicorn Offline
if you tip someone
say in the usa where tipping is manditory
does that mean the person has been serving you as a slave for free prior to that ?

does tipping culture validate slavery ?
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#14
stryder Offline
Ancient Greeks considered the point of slavery but most of the philosophers actually took a Xenogenic perspective. There was only a few (Sophists being one) that actually considered that men of different cultures should have the same base freedoms of the men of their own culture (yes it was very sexist).

Slaves in Ancient Greece and Rome were usually captured after warfare or piracy. So technically they were "indenture servants", forced into doing the bidding of the victor state.

American slavery was somewhat different since the people enslaved were families and villagers on the African continent. They weren't captured after war or piracy, they were accosted and sold as someone elses property. The reason that occurred in Africa is because if people had been accosted from the streets of the lands where those committing the accosting acts lived, slavery would have died a death a lot sooner.

That however is the difference between "Indenture" where someone has broke a rule or attacked a land and is being forced to make amends through unpaid work and the evil nature of absolute slavery where it didn't matter whether you'd lived a life of piety, if you just happened to be in the wrong place you could find yourself accosted.

Incidentally accosting families meant they could split those families up and use them as leverage against each other so if they tried to escape or didn't do as was said, their family would find themselves punished for it. Such immoral means of conduct is why it might be perceived that people didn't fight slavery so much, only because of the oppression.
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#15
C C Offline
(Oct 22, 2018 10:57 AM)RainbowUnicorn Wrote: if you tip someone
say in the usa where tipping is manditory
does that mean the person has been serving you as a slave for free prior to that ?

does tipping culture validate slavery ?


A requirement of owning another human being is presumably entailed in the anchored concept, if not every contingent definition slash usage of slavery, to distinguish it from fleetingly temporary or intermittent acts of servitude.

Apparently, trying to condemn (pre-European) Native American slavery practices as well as Muslim slavery practices of bygone history would run into the obstacle of that being racially and ethnically biased, oppressive judgement being passed on those quasi-extinct societies by current (reformed) Western culture. Or IOW the retrospective "damning" being dispensed by (again current, rehabilitated) white values, white morality, white worldview, white psychology, white temperament, etc. Even disapproval issued by via the spirit of international or United Nations formal documents would doubtless be descended from or adulterated / tainted with the influences of Euro-PanAmerica orientation treating itself as THE objective, neutral, meta-cultural, non-prejudiced standard for evaluating the historical beliefs and practices of the rest (Others).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_slave_trade

Muslims also enslaved Europeans. According to Robert Davis, between 1 million and 1.25 million Europeans were captured between the 16th and 19th centuries by Barbary corsairs, who were vassals of the Ottoman Empire, and sold as slaves. These slaves were captured mainly from seaside villages from Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, and also from more distant places like France or England, the Netherlands, and even Iceland. They were also taken from ships stopped by the pirates.

The effects of these attacks were devastating: France, England, and Spain each lost thousands of ships. Long stretches of the Spanish and Italian coasts were almost completely abandoned by their inhabitants, because of frequent pirate attacks. Pirate raids discouraged settlement along the coast until the 19th century. Periodic Muslim raiding expeditions were sent from Islamic Iberia to ravage the Christian Iberian kingdoms, bringing back slaves. In a raid against Lisbon in 1189, for example, the Almohad Berber Muslim caliph, Abu Yusuf Yaqub al-Mansur, took 3,000 female and child captives, while his governor of Córdoba, in a subsequent attack upon Silves in 1191, took 3,000 Christian slaves.

[...] The Arab slave trade, across the Sahara desert and across the Indian Ocean, began after Muslim Arab and Swahili traders won control of the Swahili Coast and sea routes during the 9th century (see Sultanate of Zanzibar). These traders captured Bantu peoples (Zanj) from the interior in present-day Kenya, Mozambique and Tanzania and brought them to the coast. There, the slaves gradually assimilated in the rural areas, particularly on the Unguja and Pemba islands.

Some historians assert that as many as 17 million people were sold into slavery on the coast of the Indian Ocean, the Middle East, and North Africa, and approximately 5 million African slaves were bought by Muslim slave traders and taken from Africa across the Red Sea, Indian Ocean, and Sahara desert between 1500 and 1900. The captives were sold throughout the Middle East. This trade accelerated as superior ships led to more trade and greater demand for labour on plantations in the region. Eventually, tens of thousands of captives were being taken every year.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_am...ted_States

Many Native American tribes practiced some form of slavery before the European introduction of African slavery into North America. Native American groups often enslaved war captives whom they primarily used for small-scale labor. Others however, were used in ritual sacrifice, usually involving torture as part of religious rites, and these sometimes involved ritual cannibalism. There were several differences between slavery as practiced in the pre-colonial era among Native Americans and slavery as practiced by Europeans after colonization. Whereas Europeans eventually came to look upon slaves of African descent as being racially inferior, Native Americans took slaves from other Native American groups, and therefore did not have the same racial ideology for their slavery. Native slaves could be looked down upon as ethnically inferior, however. Another difference was that Native Americans did not buy and sell captives in the pre-colonial era, although they sometimes exchanged enslaved individuals with other tribes in peace gestures or in exchange for redeeming their own members. In some cases, Native American slaves were allowed to live on the fringes of Native American society until they were slowly integrated into the tribe. The word "slave" may not accurately apply to such captive people.


~
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#16
Syne Offline
(Oct 22, 2018 03:40 PM)stryder Wrote: Ancient Greeks considered the point of slavery but most of the philosophers actually took a Xenogenic perspective.  There was only a few (Sophists being one) that actually considered that men of different cultures should have the same base freedoms of the men of their own culture (yes it was very sexist).

Slaves in Ancient Greece and Rome were usually captured after warfare or piracy.  So technically they were "indenture servants", forced into doing the bidding of the victor state.

American slavery was somewhat different since the people enslaved were families and villagers on the African continent.  They weren't captured after war or piracy, they were accosted and sold as someone elses property.  The reason that occurred in Africa is because if people had been accosted from the streets of the lands where those committing the accosting acts lived, slavery would have died a death a lot sooner.

That however is the difference between "Indenture" where someone has broke a rule or attacked a land and is being forced to make amends through unpaid work and the evil nature of absolute slavery where it didn't matter whether you'd lived a life of piety, if you just happened to be in the wrong place you could find yourself accosted.

Incidentally accosting families meant they could split those families up and use them as leverage against each other so if they tried to escape or didn't do as was said, their family would find themselves punished for it.  Such immoral means of conduct is why it might be perceived that people didn't fight slavery so much, only because of the oppression.

No, indentured servitude was for a fixed term, usually as a payment or sentence. Ancient Roman and Greek slaves were spoils of war and chattel property. Those enslaved were just as likely to be families and non-combatants.

How were people actually enslaved? Most slaves in Africa were captured in wars or in surprise raids on villages.
- http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_te...2&psid=445

IOW, war or piracy (raids).

It's revisionist history to try whitewashing ancient history to make more modern slavery look worse. Ancient slavery was not wholly retaliatory nor as benign as you make it sound.
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#17
Leigha Offline
Acquiescence isn't acceptance, though. Slavery is always morally wrong, because one side is never able to really consent. Just like kidnapping someone would always be wrong, or rape. If there is no ability to consent, then I'd consider it morally wrong.
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#18
Syne Offline
Consent is a relatively modern standard for morality, so that would seem to be a consideration of the past through the lens of modern sensibilities (presentism). Acquiescence is literally "reluctant acceptance" and certainly not outright rejection.
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#19
Leigha Offline
Yet, a few brave souls stood up to the immorality of slavery and brought it to and end. Decades ago. Morality has always existed, but it takes a few fine men and women to rise above the majority, and risk their lives and reputations to do the right things. 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.
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#20
Syne Offline
(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.
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