Doing a Kant (was Re: Rhetorical Gestures)

[kelley]

now this is really swift.  it's somehow more odious to own slaves than it
is to make a living owning a factory and ease the toil of household mgmt by
hiring household servants that you shove up in the third floor in squalid
condition and treat like dirt all the same.

At 09:53 AM 10/20/1999 EDT, Carl Remick wrote:
>>Those who criticise Kant (or Jefferson) for failing to live up to the
>>principles of equality that they enunciated do not understand that their
>>criticisms are wholly parasitic upon those very principles.
>
>You lost me there so far as Jefferson is concerned, Jim.  The Lord of 
>Monticello got a good working over here on the list a year ago, when I 
>proposed that the Jefferson Memorial be bulldozed as an utterly 
>ill-conceived monument to one of the greatest hypocrites of history.  I was 
>accused at that time of being a 20th century provincial -- or words to that 
>effect -- for imposing contemporary views of racial relations on the 18th 
>century.  I do not accept that criticism.  Jefferson's own troubled 
>reflections about the vengeance that a "just God" could visit on slaveholder 
>(I can't recall his exact words) surely suggests that, at some level, 
>Jefferson himself realized he was full of it.
>
>Carl
>
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