Chris Doss wrote:
>FWIW I don't think it makes much sense to talk about
slave owners as being "bad people" in an era in which
slavery was taken for granted.
I must disagree. Slavery was a fact of life for many, but the existence of an abolition movement seems to suggest that slavery was not "taken for granted" and that slave owners were viewed in their own time as bad people.
I am not an expert, but there seems to have been strong resistance to chattel slavery throughout most of its existence. The fact that slave owners freed their slaves upon their deaths seems also to lend credence to the belief that they were doing something bad and knew it.
Just because something occurs, e.g. chattel slavery, war, internment camps, doesn't mean that it is taken for granted as being part of the way things are (isn't that the naturalistic fallacy I was told I was making before?). Rather it means that an elite group had enough power to have its way.
Brian Dauth Queer Buddhist Resister