I would love to see some data on the unusualness of "let slaves live long, and have kids". The prototypical slavery in minds (even if not in history), the Greco-Roman one, was like that; serfdoms across Europe (many of which were basically glorified slaveries) were like that; and I am pretty sure Chinese slavery was familial as well.
Actually, there are even two questions here:
1. Was it even really unusual for slavery _writ large_?
2. Even if it was, was it unusual _for European heritage_?
Also, both "enslaving is worse than killing" and "being enslaved is better than being killed" can be true, if one considers that enslaving implies keeping enslaved and so is an _extended_ moral decision.
I imagine this is a snarky reply and not an actual advice. Because, uh, I like LLMs for what they are, but I understand their flaws enough to know this is not really an LLM-reliable kind of request.
I think he was looking for discourse and filtering, not an encyclopedia entry Robin. You are also missing how many people don't use LLMs and won't, it's a niche thing even today.
LLMs do not give you reliable data. They hallucinate frequently, and they also tend to be yes-men, agreeing with and supporting the user, because that's how they were trained. You cannot trust any data from an LLM. You're a former AI researcher - you should know better than this.
The argument isn't that zero slaves had surviving offspring, but instead that at a population level they were below replacement, while the rest of society would be roughly at replacement. Slaves in the US had "natural increase", because the environment was non-Malthusian, and that difference could also be seen in populations of European settlers vs those who still lived in Europe.
It is a very different argument from Hanson's argument then. He does appear to claim that slaves are normally intentionally not _allowed_ to reproduce and US was unusual in that.
I think it's more of an abstract argument: slaves COULD be prohibited from reproducing, which would prevent the next generation of slaves from being born.
Who is to blame for slavery ? The answer is anyone involved in the development and maintenance of the supply chain. There is no sliding scale of blame here, either. Once you participate in something like this you are just as guilty as anyone else. Take away the market and you have no need for the slaves. Take away any step in the procurement process and the supply chain falters unless you have already established a population of slaves which you are breeding locally. If I had to say which was the most egregious of all of the crimes listed above, that would be it - establishing a population you use as breeding stock for slaves permanently. Otherwise, all of these are equally heinous crimes against humanity.
Do you hold yourself to this same standard of equal responsibility? It's likely you are responsible for enslavement and killing if you have used petroleum or any illegal drug, or if you've bought a diamond that wasn't industrially produced.
Please correct me if I misunderstood you but it sounded like "Take away the market..." implies the purchasers are included equally with the other parts of the supply chain.
I was referring to the slavery supply chain specifically. To be fair to myself, I haven't used illegal drugs since I was in high school and then only a couple times. I have never purchased a diamond myself although my parents did but they would not have known about the cruelty of diamond mining when they purchased it back in the early 1950s. As for petroleum we are complicit in this supply chain. So yes, We have to do our part to minimize our use of these products. This particularly supply chain is a bit different than the slave market supply chain in that its benefits are spread out substantially unequally and there are forces out there in place that strive to maintain it - political ones, military ones, economic ones and even cultural ones. Most of us have little influence over these forces except with our purchasing power which I my opinion for something like petroleum has little influence. It takes a long time to make changes to a market like that based strictly on the buying power of the consumer - in my opinion.
The way you feel about oil is the way I feel about a lot of things. The way I think of it is that we are in a world full of incentives, and there's only so hard people will fight them.
The thing is failing to establish that breeding stock ensure more wars (as have to replace them) as well as the death of all the descendants (they don't have any).
Speaking of which, ignoring chattel slavery, so let's say Rome, Egypt, Norway, etc, how were slave kids handled, just post nataly aborted? People are having sex, even slave on slave or owner on property, kids going to happen.
I get some were adopted into the household but those tend to be the masters blood, not slave on slave or the groundskeeper.
I don't know if that's true as most of history, I've been lead to believe, isn't chattel in nature i.e. if I'm a Viking villager, I just don't think I want to feed a slave infant for years before I can get productive use from them when I could just go buy one already grown or raid the next village over. I feel like 99% of the time they just got post nataly aborted.
Granted that is just my feeling, no idea if it's true. I get what you are saying as far as chattel but likewise my understanding is that was rare, i.e. the Americas in modern times, "enslaved people" in times past (i.e. Jews in Egypt for example, Feudal serfs and peasants, etc). Why am I paying for a useless eater when I can just get new ones? Is the argument kids keep your adult slaves docile as they are institutionalized since birth PLUS effectively a good hostage against the parents rebelling? I just can't imagine the cost to raise a kid to working age < the cost to simply buy an adult outside places, like the US North, where importation became illegal at some point but existing renewable stock was fine, i.e. Rhode Island.
The Israelites had children in Egypt. The Passover tradition stems their belief that God smote the entire generation of firstborn Egyptian male children. His angel supposedly went door to door killing the children but passed over the Israelites homes because they followed his command mark their doors with lambs blood.
I suspect the cost to raise an infant to working age, probably 5 or 6 and you would get something useful from someone, wouldn't be all that much. First year the infant is breast feed. Many would die from disease. And those that would survive could be sold rather than killed off after being trained.
Could be, I forgot your resell point but that goes again to chattel slavery and my understanding, maybe wrong, is that was extremely rare throughout history.
Chattel slavery isn't that rare. The American system was chattel as were the Greek and Roman systems same in Brazil and the Caribbean. And let's be real about Serfdom, once you are born into it you rarely get out. Same with indentured servitude. The debt is often familial. If it isn't paid off it would get transferred from generation to generation.
Epistemic access plays no small part in this equation. Do we know which of the products we rely on daily contain components that were procured through modern-day slavery?
How to covercome bias. The language and opening framing highlight the culpability of African wars. Bias continues when agency is implied rather than stated due to the elision of subject noun phrases. Number 4 is "Sell to Europeans." It could be rephrased as "Europeans purchase". Number 5 could be rewritten as "Europeans and Americans move slaves to the US." Instead of number 5, "US Farmers buy" it could be "US slave traders buy and sell to farmers."
What has been elided here:
Massive maritime infrastructure came into play due to prior European expertise with overseas mercantilism and capitalist markets. This knowledge base revved into high gear due to the astounding profits that were available in slave trading. This machinery and expertise are tucked out-of-sight due to the strategic language used in Hanson's poll.
Sell to Europeans was given a 5 out of 100 for blame in your list. If this item had been rephrased as Europeans purchased slaves [for the high profit anticipated, for selling them to work on plantations] that vote of blame would be much higher. Because, everyday readers of your poll are knowledgeable enough to understand the high level of organization, intent and power that was marshaled by the European slave traders. The intent was the profit motive. The profits were extraordinary and unprecedented. It is well-known that profit was foregrounded in the 1800s discussions about abolishing the slave trade. You [Hanson] of course know this, but were able to find a linguistic way to reorganize your readers' deliberations.
The evidence of the all-important role of profit is easy to find, for example : The Duke of Clarence argued that the trade was essential for the survival of the colonies. He quoted a memorial from Dutch planters to illustrate that without a constant supply of new slaves, plantations would face "diminution of produce" and "certain ruin". He claimed the abolition would be a "fatal blow" to British interests and that the idea of the trade being inhumane was a "charge... without the least foundation in fact".
Robin, Thanks for introducing this framework to sharpen discussion when you visited my seminar about "America & _The Wealth of Nations_," and for then taking a poll at X. I expected more respondents to select Step 1 (wars of enslavement among African groups). Food for thought.
but enslaving could be seen as the mechanism that makes extracting value easier, hence encouraging wars. so it might be bad systematically, but better for each individual outcome
I see at least one missing step - "enforce slave ownership". Where the local legal and police system treats this property right in humans as permanent and total in a way it doesn't for indentured service. That feels both morally blameworthy and not just the naked self-interest we would expect of the 'farmers'.
Your argument seems to be, "better that the slave owner enslaved the slaves' children, than for them to murder the slaves past their prime and prevent them from reproducing." Both would be monstrous acts. Slavery on the one hand, murder and genocide on the other.
Better that the slave owner let the slaves and their children live their own lives, freely. If that's not something the slave owner is willing to do, it's because the slave owner is a morally bankrupt person.
Seems the upshot of this is that people, including those who answered your poll on X, are a) not naturally utilitarian / consequentialist and b) don't readily entertain counterfactuals when moral questions are charged, at least in this way. I'm not sure what else it says, though. I'd guess responders to your poll are less likely to have these qualities as intensely than average.
d) If you annoy them by pointing out any of this or by trying to get consistent answers, they’re likely to attack you, which is probably an economically sound decision.
Utilitarian can use hedonic calculus to measure actions (developed by Jeremy Bentham, the founder of modern utilitarianism). His criteria were: duration (How long the suffering lasts) and intensity (how intense the suffering is). In this way slavery can become worse than murder.
Ultimately, I think the blame, if there is any specific one, is not any of those you listed, but rather the decision of the framers of the Constitution to allow slavery, albeit with restrictions. They made the decision as a compromise because without it, the Southern states would not have bought into the Union. There would have been two unions fighting each other, and indeed that happened some 65 years later.
So you're saying slavery in the South would've continued even if the Constitution had prohibited slavery? ("the Southern states would not have bought into the Union") If so, why blame the Constitution either way?
I did not say it, but I think it's likely true. The southern states would not have joined a union that outlawed slavery. Most people think there would have been two unions, one free in the North and one slave in the South. And the slaves in the South would have remained slaves, without a countervening force in the North.
I have often heard about Civil-War era farmers, "they shoulda picked their own damned cotton!" In that alternative universe, the black Africans enslaved by other black Africans could have remained in what apparently otherwise would have been an ethnically-pure paradise and the USA would not still be dealing with The Original Sin. But in this current universe, I did so much appreciate all the racial healing of the Obama years.
Are you pure utilitarian? I get that impression from the question and your observations.
Utilitarian explanation uses hedonic calculus to measure actions (developed by Jeremy Bentham, the founder of modern utilitarianism). His criteria were: duration (How long the suffering lasts) and intensity (how intense the suffering is).
---
For someone who is not completely utilitarian, the answers make even more sense.
For non-utilitarian moral blame is not proportional to the badness of the outcome (which is a logical and philosophical category error known as the 'Consequentialist Flaw' in moral philosophy).
This leads directly into the 'Better Off' fallacy. There are three options: to kill, to exploit, or to set someone free. The killer 'succumbing' to greed does not make their moral choice better and less blameworthy.
Distinction between 'badness' and 'wrongness. Deontological ethics can mirrors hedonic calculus of utilitarians from the point of view of the nature of the act itself. Death may be a worse outcome for the victim, but enslavement requires a constant, continuous, and active will to dominate another person.
ps. What if the slave has "Live free or die" preference? Does this flip the moral calculus?
Discussions like this make me wonder what "blame" really means. Should we adjudicate blame based on the morals of the time, or of the present day? It just doesn't seem like a useful exercise.
To me the clearest definition of blame is in reference to the counterfactual: What would have happened if the decision had gone the other way. And the problem is, on these grand-sweep-of-history topics we have no idea what that other path looks like.
I've seen it argued that slavery was a net good for Black people in America because in the end it brought their descendants into a higher standard of living than if they'd stayed back in Africa. I'm not convinced by the argument but it does underscore the difficulty of applying present-day morals to times long past.
I don't see what's the point of this question. Let's say that we definitively established who's to blame for events centuries in the past, what would be the relevance for today?
Ultimately this could be viewed as an empirical question. Where can we get best "bang for buck" by allocating blame, to prevent future atrocities of this sort? Step 6 creates profits for slavers, and thus demand for steps 1-5. If US farmers stop buying, people will no longer be shipped across the ocean, fewer traders will buy slaves in Africa, and there will be fewer wars motivated by desire to enslave. So Step 6 seems like a relatively high-leverage point of intervention, and thus a good place to allocate blame.
The US stopped the importation of slaves in 1808. The massacres in Rwanda (to pick one) occurred in 1994. Seems pretty clear one didn't have much to do with the other.
Stopping the importation of slaves in 1808 is a blame factor not on Robin's list, and one that I would rank pretty highly.
Constraining the supply is what led to (a) slave values rapidly increasing, ultimately resulting in a large fraction of Southerners' net worth being comprised of slaves (another reason to keep slavery legal), and (b) encouraging slaves to have children.
Thank you for taking an approach to use some social science on a difficult and controversial subject in these times. Since my first ancestor in these lands, with a European name, arrived in America in 1492, two dynamic processes have been shown in the history here. A military logistics empowered faction, and an incumbent social network that tried to retain mindset of their village life, in a concept of an enduring meaning that inter-generational culture and story provided as a stability for living. When the Pope tried to settle rivalry by designating a longitude on the map giving Spain the west of it and Portugal the east from it, this reminds again of that process where a group supplied resources for military conquest lives by claiming new discovered territory, and someone living there must fight or accept claim upon them, and the new order of the world it will declare. I'm thinking of neurobehavior and do not find much of a convenient means in writing some answer, like a philosophy, solving the overall problem in this history. But what my biology study shows is that in the paleoanthropology discovery, digging old human relics that date back to about 400 thousand years, when there were three species groups of humans, there is no indication that they existed cooperatively as neighbors. It may be the mindset relic of a vicious competition eventually leading to the winner, Homo sapiens, with a small number having genes from Neanderthal, and another with Juluensis, but ultimately one species beat the others in surviving and adapting. Today, we have terms in our English language that are more or less a product of the English translation of the Bible by King James, so that people are described as Black and White. Why the Greek and older Aramaic references in texts had to be simplified into polarized defining terms in English is a non-obvious motivation in neurobehavior. The philosophical process shows echoes of nothing particularly worthy of any kind of scientifically based meaning requiring validation as if actually of enduring quality. Absolutely nothing about objectively real facts validates a story to make such a long, persistent hardship and injustice by one self-defined group of people upon another. However, if it is just as clear that we are all human, then the problem dates back farther than the social economics of pioneering the "New World" in the 1700s. I hope that as we better understand our own neurobehavior, we will avoid the pitfalls as a cohesive social community and not repeat the kind of vicious cruelty enmass that has clearly happened a substantial number of times in our common human past. After all, our genes mostly all come from Homo sapiens out of the northeast of Africa in our modern human form. We could reasonably see that link as substantial.
I would love to see some data on the unusualness of "let slaves live long, and have kids". The prototypical slavery in minds (even if not in history), the Greco-Roman one, was like that; serfdoms across Europe (many of which were basically glorified slaveries) were like that; and I am pretty sure Chinese slavery was familial as well.
Actually, there are even two questions here:
1. Was it even really unusual for slavery _writ large_?
2. Even if it was, was it unusual _for European heritage_?
Also, both "enslaving is worse than killing" and "being enslaved is better than being killed" can be true, if one considers that enslaving implies keeping enslaved and so is an _extended_ moral decision.
"I would love to see some data" Ask a LLM.
I imagine this is a snarky reply and not an actual advice. Because, uh, I like LLMs for what they are, but I understand their flaws enough to know this is not really an LLM-reliable kind of request.
It worked for me.
I think he was looking for discourse and filtering, not an encyclopedia entry Robin. You are also missing how many people don't use LLMs and won't, it's a niche thing even today.
LLMs do not give you reliable data. They hallucinate frequently, and they also tend to be yes-men, agreeing with and supporting the user, because that's how they were trained. You cannot trust any data from an LLM. You're a former AI researcher - you should know better than this.
The Old World was Malthusian, slaves weren't fed enough to reproduce themselves. https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2012/03/02/the-biology-of-slavery/
That's a hypothesis, but I note that the source you offered also doesn't offer any hard data on the matter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_ancient_Rome#Vernae and its sources seem to somewhat disagree.
The argument isn't that zero slaves had surviving offspring, but instead that at a population level they were below replacement, while the rest of society would be roughly at replacement. Slaves in the US had "natural increase", because the environment was non-Malthusian, and that difference could also be seen in populations of European settlers vs those who still lived in Europe.
It is a very different argument from Hanson's argument then. He does appear to claim that slaves are normally intentionally not _allowed_ to reproduce and US was unusual in that.
I think it's more of an abstract argument: slaves COULD be prohibited from reproducing, which would prevent the next generation of slaves from being born.
Who is to blame for slavery ? The answer is anyone involved in the development and maintenance of the supply chain. There is no sliding scale of blame here, either. Once you participate in something like this you are just as guilty as anyone else. Take away the market and you have no need for the slaves. Take away any step in the procurement process and the supply chain falters unless you have already established a population of slaves which you are breeding locally. If I had to say which was the most egregious of all of the crimes listed above, that would be it - establishing a population you use as breeding stock for slaves permanently. Otherwise, all of these are equally heinous crimes against humanity.
Copenhagen interpretation of ethics (<https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zTiqHtAQurX35QBAs/repost-the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics>)?
Do you hold yourself to this same standard of equal responsibility? It's likely you are responsible for enslavement and killing if you have used petroleum or any illegal drug, or if you've bought a diamond that wasn't industrially produced.
Please correct me if I misunderstood you but it sounded like "Take away the market..." implies the purchasers are included equally with the other parts of the supply chain.
I was referring to the slavery supply chain specifically. To be fair to myself, I haven't used illegal drugs since I was in high school and then only a couple times. I have never purchased a diamond myself although my parents did but they would not have known about the cruelty of diamond mining when they purchased it back in the early 1950s. As for petroleum we are complicit in this supply chain. So yes, We have to do our part to minimize our use of these products. This particularly supply chain is a bit different than the slave market supply chain in that its benefits are spread out substantially unequally and there are forces out there in place that strive to maintain it - political ones, military ones, economic ones and even cultural ones. Most of us have little influence over these forces except with our purchasing power which I my opinion for something like petroleum has little influence. It takes a long time to make changes to a market like that based strictly on the buying power of the consumer - in my opinion.
The way you feel about oil is the way I feel about a lot of things. The way I think of it is that we are in a world full of incentives, and there's only so hard people will fight them.
The thing is failing to establish that breeding stock ensure more wars (as have to replace them) as well as the death of all the descendants (they don't have any).
Speaking of which, ignoring chattel slavery, so let's say Rome, Egypt, Norway, etc, how were slave kids handled, just post nataly aborted? People are having sex, even slave on slave or owner on property, kids going to happen.
I get some were adopted into the household but those tend to be the masters blood, not slave on slave or the groundskeeper.
Most slave children would have become slaves themselves regardless of the period of history.
I don't know if that's true as most of history, I've been lead to believe, isn't chattel in nature i.e. if I'm a Viking villager, I just don't think I want to feed a slave infant for years before I can get productive use from them when I could just go buy one already grown or raid the next village over. I feel like 99% of the time they just got post nataly aborted.
Granted that is just my feeling, no idea if it's true. I get what you are saying as far as chattel but likewise my understanding is that was rare, i.e. the Americas in modern times, "enslaved people" in times past (i.e. Jews in Egypt for example, Feudal serfs and peasants, etc). Why am I paying for a useless eater when I can just get new ones? Is the argument kids keep your adult slaves docile as they are institutionalized since birth PLUS effectively a good hostage against the parents rebelling? I just can't imagine the cost to raise a kid to working age < the cost to simply buy an adult outside places, like the US North, where importation became illegal at some point but existing renewable stock was fine, i.e. Rhode Island.
The Israelites had children in Egypt. The Passover tradition stems their belief that God smote the entire generation of firstborn Egyptian male children. His angel supposedly went door to door killing the children but passed over the Israelites homes because they followed his command mark their doors with lambs blood.
I suspect the cost to raise an infant to working age, probably 5 or 6 and you would get something useful from someone, wouldn't be all that much. First year the infant is breast feed. Many would die from disease. And those that would survive could be sold rather than killed off after being trained.
Could be, I forgot your resell point but that goes again to chattel slavery and my understanding, maybe wrong, is that was extremely rare throughout history.
Chattel slavery isn't that rare. The American system was chattel as were the Greek and Roman systems same in Brazil and the Caribbean. And let's be real about Serfdom, once you are born into it you rarely get out. Same with indentured servitude. The debt is often familial. If it isn't paid off it would get transferred from generation to generation.
Epistemic access plays no small part in this equation. Do we know which of the products we rely on daily contain components that were procured through modern-day slavery?
Anything produced in factories in Africa or South East Asia is potentially sourced from what is effectively slave labor.
Any commodity harvesting from those areas may be conducted by slave labor.
How to covercome bias. The language and opening framing highlight the culpability of African wars. Bias continues when agency is implied rather than stated due to the elision of subject noun phrases. Number 4 is "Sell to Europeans." It could be rephrased as "Europeans purchase". Number 5 could be rewritten as "Europeans and Americans move slaves to the US." Instead of number 5, "US Farmers buy" it could be "US slave traders buy and sell to farmers."
What has been elided here:
Massive maritime infrastructure came into play due to prior European expertise with overseas mercantilism and capitalist markets. This knowledge base revved into high gear due to the astounding profits that were available in slave trading. This machinery and expertise are tucked out-of-sight due to the strategic language used in Hanson's poll.
And once one has learned that such items could have been worded differently, which step do you then blame?
Sell to Europeans was given a 5 out of 100 for blame in your list. If this item had been rephrased as Europeans purchased slaves [for the high profit anticipated, for selling them to work on plantations] that vote of blame would be much higher. Because, everyday readers of your poll are knowledgeable enough to understand the high level of organization, intent and power that was marshaled by the European slave traders. The intent was the profit motive. The profits were extraordinary and unprecedented. It is well-known that profit was foregrounded in the 1800s discussions about abolishing the slave trade. You [Hanson] of course know this, but were able to find a linguistic way to reorganize your readers' deliberations.
The evidence of the all-important role of profit is easy to find, for example : The Duke of Clarence argued that the trade was essential for the survival of the colonies. He quoted a memorial from Dutch planters to illustrate that without a constant supply of new slaves, plantations would face "diminution of produce" and "certain ruin". He claimed the abolition would be a "fatal blow" to British interests and that the idea of the trade being inhumane was a "charge... without the least foundation in fact".
Are you sure the most important elided part is not “White people are white; therefore, they are to blame”?
Oh, yes. Astute observation.
Robin, Thanks for introducing this framework to sharpen discussion when you visited my seminar about "America & _The Wealth of Nations_," and for then taking a poll at X. I expected more respondents to select Step 1 (wars of enslavement among African groups). Food for thought.
Thank you for hosting me.
i think that 1 is the worst. (wars are bad!)
but enslaving could be seen as the mechanism that makes extracting value easier, hence encouraging wars. so it might be bad systematically, but better for each individual outcome
I see at least one missing step - "enforce slave ownership". Where the local legal and police system treats this property right in humans as permanent and total in a way it doesn't for indentured service. That feels both morally blameworthy and not just the naked self-interest we would expect of the 'farmers'.
Your argument seems to be, "better that the slave owner enslaved the slaves' children, than for them to murder the slaves past their prime and prevent them from reproducing." Both would be monstrous acts. Slavery on the one hand, murder and genocide on the other.
Better that the slave owner let the slaves and their children live their own lives, freely. If that's not something the slave owner is willing to do, it's because the slave owner is a morally bankrupt person.
Calling slavery a 'mistake' is a trap, and what you call a 'causal path' isn't one.
Here is a counterfactual that IMHO is worthwhile discussing:
In 1790 Eli Whitney gets generously compensated for the cotton gin patent, so it becomes 'open source'.
Whitney's patent was widely ignored because of the way he tried to collect royalties on cleaned cotton so it was de facto 'open source'.
You are right. I naively believed that just lowering the license fees would have made a difference.
It would have taken a lot more.
Seems the upshot of this is that people, including those who answered your poll on X, are a) not naturally utilitarian / consequentialist and b) don't readily entertain counterfactuals when moral questions are charged, at least in this way. I'm not sure what else it says, though. I'd guess responders to your poll are less likely to have these qualities as intensely than average.
c) They don’t care about being consistent.
d) If you annoy them by pointing out any of this or by trying to get consistent answers, they’re likely to attack you, which is probably an economically sound decision.
Utilitarian can use hedonic calculus to measure actions (developed by Jeremy Bentham, the founder of modern utilitarianism). His criteria were: duration (How long the suffering lasts) and intensity (how intense the suffering is). In this way slavery can become worse than murder.
Ultimately, I think the blame, if there is any specific one, is not any of those you listed, but rather the decision of the framers of the Constitution to allow slavery, albeit with restrictions. They made the decision as a compromise because without it, the Southern states would not have bought into the Union. There would have been two unions fighting each other, and indeed that happened some 65 years later.
The independent “United States” began long before the Constitution was ratified. The Constitution is not to blame for the slavery in the states.
So you're saying slavery in the South would've continued even if the Constitution had prohibited slavery? ("the Southern states would not have bought into the Union") If so, why blame the Constitution either way?
I did not say it, but I think it's likely true. The southern states would not have joined a union that outlawed slavery. Most people think there would have been two unions, one free in the North and one slave in the South. And the slaves in the South would have remained slaves, without a countervening force in the North.
I have often heard about Civil-War era farmers, "they shoulda picked their own damned cotton!" In that alternative universe, the black Africans enslaved by other black Africans could have remained in what apparently otherwise would have been an ethnically-pure paradise and the USA would not still be dealing with The Original Sin. But in this current universe, I did so much appreciate all the racial healing of the Obama years.
Are you pure utilitarian? I get that impression from the question and your observations.
Utilitarian explanation uses hedonic calculus to measure actions (developed by Jeremy Bentham, the founder of modern utilitarianism). His criteria were: duration (How long the suffering lasts) and intensity (how intense the suffering is).
---
For someone who is not completely utilitarian, the answers make even more sense.
For non-utilitarian moral blame is not proportional to the badness of the outcome (which is a logical and philosophical category error known as the 'Consequentialist Flaw' in moral philosophy).
This leads directly into the 'Better Off' fallacy. There are three options: to kill, to exploit, or to set someone free. The killer 'succumbing' to greed does not make their moral choice better and less blameworthy.
Distinction between 'badness' and 'wrongness. Deontological ethics can mirrors hedonic calculus of utilitarians from the point of view of the nature of the act itself. Death may be a worse outcome for the victim, but enslavement requires a constant, continuous, and active will to dominate another person.
ps. What if the slave has "Live free or die" preference? Does this flip the moral calculus?
Discussions like this make me wonder what "blame" really means. Should we adjudicate blame based on the morals of the time, or of the present day? It just doesn't seem like a useful exercise.
To me the clearest definition of blame is in reference to the counterfactual: What would have happened if the decision had gone the other way. And the problem is, on these grand-sweep-of-history topics we have no idea what that other path looks like.
I've seen it argued that slavery was a net good for Black people in America because in the end it brought their descendants into a higher standard of living than if they'd stayed back in Africa. I'm not convinced by the argument but it does underscore the difficulty of applying present-day morals to times long past.
I don't see what's the point of this question. Let's say that we definitively established who's to blame for events centuries in the past, what would be the relevance for today?
Ultimately this could be viewed as an empirical question. Where can we get best "bang for buck" by allocating blame, to prevent future atrocities of this sort? Step 6 creates profits for slavers, and thus demand for steps 1-5. If US farmers stop buying, people will no longer be shipped across the ocean, fewer traders will buy slaves in Africa, and there will be fewer wars motivated by desire to enslave. So Step 6 seems like a relatively high-leverage point of intervention, and thus a good place to allocate blame.
The US stopped the importation of slaves in 1808. The massacres in Rwanda (to pick one) occurred in 1994. Seems pretty clear one didn't have much to do with the other.
Stopping the importation of slaves in 1808 is a blame factor not on Robin's list, and one that I would rank pretty highly.
Constraining the supply is what led to (a) slave values rapidly increasing, ultimately resulting in a large fraction of Southerners' net worth being comprised of slaves (another reason to keep slavery legal), and (b) encouraging slaves to have children.
I’m confused how the last one ended up as 100.0
Was this averaged among responses? Did all ~4000 people give it the top possible score? Or is this a data entry mistake of some sort
The highest one is set to 100, the others are values relative to 100.
Thank you for taking an approach to use some social science on a difficult and controversial subject in these times. Since my first ancestor in these lands, with a European name, arrived in America in 1492, two dynamic processes have been shown in the history here. A military logistics empowered faction, and an incumbent social network that tried to retain mindset of their village life, in a concept of an enduring meaning that inter-generational culture and story provided as a stability for living. When the Pope tried to settle rivalry by designating a longitude on the map giving Spain the west of it and Portugal the east from it, this reminds again of that process where a group supplied resources for military conquest lives by claiming new discovered territory, and someone living there must fight or accept claim upon them, and the new order of the world it will declare. I'm thinking of neurobehavior and do not find much of a convenient means in writing some answer, like a philosophy, solving the overall problem in this history. But what my biology study shows is that in the paleoanthropology discovery, digging old human relics that date back to about 400 thousand years, when there were three species groups of humans, there is no indication that they existed cooperatively as neighbors. It may be the mindset relic of a vicious competition eventually leading to the winner, Homo sapiens, with a small number having genes from Neanderthal, and another with Juluensis, but ultimately one species beat the others in surviving and adapting. Today, we have terms in our English language that are more or less a product of the English translation of the Bible by King James, so that people are described as Black and White. Why the Greek and older Aramaic references in texts had to be simplified into polarized defining terms in English is a non-obvious motivation in neurobehavior. The philosophical process shows echoes of nothing particularly worthy of any kind of scientifically based meaning requiring validation as if actually of enduring quality. Absolutely nothing about objectively real facts validates a story to make such a long, persistent hardship and injustice by one self-defined group of people upon another. However, if it is just as clear that we are all human, then the problem dates back farther than the social economics of pioneering the "New World" in the 1700s. I hope that as we better understand our own neurobehavior, we will avoid the pitfalls as a cohesive social community and not repeat the kind of vicious cruelty enmass that has clearly happened a substantial number of times in our common human past. After all, our genes mostly all come from Homo sapiens out of the northeast of Africa in our modern human form. We could reasonably see that link as substantial.