Ethical foundations of the left

Justin Schwartz jkschw at hotmail.com
Mon Jul 23 11:49:35 PDT 2001


Read Herzog's "Happy Slaves." But look, I said it is actually very hard to show that slavery per se (the ownership of other human beings as property) and not its normal incidents (abuse, oppression, exploitation, etc.) is evil. I don't want to get into the argument now. But it's my view that slavery per se is an almost umitigatable evil, even if it's very nice, voluntary chosen and accepted, and materially better than the alternatives. And, dogmatically, nothing will change my mind on that. Moreover, I believe this is a fairly common view.

--jks


>
> >Absolutely nothing could persuade me that slavery is better than freedom,
> >even though this is remarkably difficult to show.
>
>What if it could be shown (and, although it's not true in this world, it's
>conceptually possible) that the slaves much preferred their lot to freedom
>and also that they were able to attain more of "the stuff that makes life
>worth living" under slavery?
>
>-- Luke
>
>
>

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