I love how you inlined the hubski discussion on your site.
Another can o' worms! But we never finished with the last one! What is coercion? Here is my definition: a person harming someone, or threatening to harm them, to bring about a change in their behavior. Let's test it: Mugger with a gun says "your money or your life." The threat of harm causes you to give up your money, which you did not want to do. Coercive. Slavery. Slaves are kidnapped against their will. Any attempt to escape is suppressed by force. Coercive. An employee (or intern, or volunteer) performs work for some person, business, or group, according to terms the worker understands and agrees to. The worker can cease working at any time, should a better opportunity appear. Not coercive. Somebody works very hard yet earns little salary. Sad perhaps, but not coercive. Conscription. It is not conscription if it is not compulsory, with some threat of punishment for non-compliance. Even if alternative service is offered, if it is not possible to completely opt out without consequence, it is coercive. Making a child eat vegetables. This is a little murky, not because of any doubt about what coercion is, but because a child is a special case of person who is not yet a completely independent agent. Making an adult eat vegetables (or not consume unhealthy things they want to consume) is clearly coercive. Taxation. Normally, people pay as little as they are required to, while recognizing a clear threat of punishment for underpayment. Seems coercive to me, but many taxpayers express some level of consent to the arrangement. It might be worth seeing what their revealed preference would be if for some reason they were tax-exempt. What's your definition?
b_b, I mean no disrespect to the original discussion. I just felt like mulling the idea over for awhile, and addressing it more seriously than I would have in a quick remark. There were a number of interesting replies. The two that struck me most were ecib’s and lil’s. ecib’s impressed me with the noble attempt at being concise. It is easy to blather on about a subject, so I always appreciate the effort to make a nice crisp assertion. Unfortunately, the question just becomes: “Why is removing agency wrong?” -- but that is, at least, a clearer question. lil’s answer was nicely lyrical. A part of me is inclined to bash people for relying on eloquence to make a point – but having done that many times I wouldn’t like to be a hypocrite. lil’s answer also expresses something consequential that probably wouldn’t get expressed so well if lil weren’t here.
I definitely made an attempt to be as concise as possible. I also agree that my answer at least immediately begs the question "Why is removing agency wrong?" I think it's harder to be concise here because we're actually approaching territory where the answer starts to approach self-evidence. We're getting to premise. It's harder to argue for or against self evident ideas and premises because a good argument won't let you use the self evident ideas and premises themselves to argue for them. Removing a person's agency cuts to the very core of what it means to be a sentient creature on this planet. With self awareness comes the ability to act and make choices based on that self awareness. Beyond just giving us the ability, agency is the primary mechanism by which we perpetuate our survival as a living creature. As humans, our survival instinct is literally manifest in our agency and the choices we make to further our own survival and interests. Agency is the literal expression and manifestation of the human survival instinct.
Were it truly self-evident, it would have been self-evident to the Romans, west Africans, Caribbean English, and all the other slaveholders in history. What is self-evident to us is that it clashes with our particular moral system. Strictly speaking, a slave is not utterly robbed of agency – but rather has his or her agency constrained to what are usually unpleasant options. The Barbados cane cutter could work, run away, attempt to kill his oppressors, do nothing and endure the beating, or commit suicide. All bad choices, but still an expression of individual agency. Only a condition like full physical paralysis would leave a person with no agency at all. In a technical sense, this causes trouble for your definition because we are all constrained by all sorts of conditions, so questions of agency become murky rather quickly. Another problem with the agency argument is that, at least hypothetically, a slave might have desires that generally lined up with those of his owners. If a slave is content, but still the legal property of another, is he not a slave nevertheless? This is why I chose a definition that defines slavery in terms of ownership rather than agency.
Indeed. Why should agency be restricted to humans, when all large animals have the self-awareness, sentience, and survival instincts that predicate agency?
It's the former two that are really fascinating. Sentience is damn hard to prove, by a strict definition, but I think it is after a fashion proved by self-awareness. And that can be shown in a lot of ways. But I always hit a wall when I try to go vegetarian. I'm up to all but one meal a week, generally.
Quoting Jeremy Bentham on the question of sentience: "The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?" I'm not perfect by any means, but I've been about 95% vegan for 2 years now. Maybe I'm just stubborn, but once I made the connection between dairy, egg and meat products and suffering, I couldn't take part in that cycle any more.
When a person enslaves another person, the enslaver ceases to be see the slave as a being that is worthy of respect; the slave becomes a commodity that happens to be alive. I do not think it is perilous to make the assertion that the vast majority of sentient beings, human or otherwise, would prefer to be regarded as a fellow sentient being that is worthy of dignity instead of as a commodity to be exploited for profit. If we apply the golden rule to this situation, it would follow that enslaving another being would be a priori immoral, and that if it can be avoided, it should be.
An interesting chain of reasoning, but the golden rule is itself a moral decision (you don't have to live by the golden rule – and many don’t) and thus it cannot be used as an a priori premise to get a necessary conclusion. Unfortunately too, even if it could, the slaveholder can still maintain his (or her) belief in the golden rule by asserting exactly what you pointed out -- that a slave is a non-person and doesn’t count -- provided the slave is sufficiently different in race, culture, etc. to be not like the people the slaveholder cares about. You and I think slavery is a very bad thing, but I don’t think you can write an a priori proof of a moral position. If all you want to prove is that slavery is incompatible with a universalized interpretation of the golden rule, then you are saying more-or-less what I have already argued – that slavery is incompatible with the enlightenment concept of equality. That far, we agree!
Interesting turnaround of my logic. It certainly is hard to extricate one's thoughts from one's cultural vantage point. Slavery isn't wrong; I think slavery is wrong.
I don't mean to sound disheartened ;) My point was that even if slavery cannot be proven to be objectively wrong, the only thing that matters for me is that I think it is wrong due to a belief that follows from my assertion that all sentient beings are deserving of dignity, and that slavery is by definition an indignity. If circumstances were to change so that I no longer believed that every sentient being is deserving of dignity, my stance on slavery would follow suit... I don't see that happening anytime soon though.
Not having a sense of dignity=/= not deserving of dignity. A demented and incontinent elderly human is certainly not dignified, but they are certainly deserving of dignity.
No, that was not my intent. Sentient means (according to Merriam-Webster): "responsive to or conscious of sense impressions" Snails are sentient, but I'm not sure how much dignity we can meaningfully bestow on them. My wife makes a living assisting "demented and incontinent elderly human"s -- so I'm not inclined to disagree on that point. I used to use the word "sapient" for what I think you're trying to capture, but that term has problems too. I've enjoyed this exchange, BTW. Thanks!
Likewise! It's been a pleasure exploring this blurry line of ethics, upon which the snail balances :)
b_b said that slavery is wrong This is clear, concise, and, to my mind at least, axiomatic. We could discuss why self-determination is fundamental, but I haven't seen anyone disagree that it is.Because the most basic human right is the right of self-determination. The essence of being a human is the right to choose.
I would argue not only that it isn't fundamental, but that it is largely illusory. http://cadwaladr.blogspot.com/2010/03/case-against-existence-of-free-will.html
Asking why slavery is wrong presuqes that slavery is wrong, indeed that it is possible for anything to be wrong. Your case against free will is interesting, but it would seeq to take qost of the guts out of the concept of qorality. I feel like I qake choices. Qost of qy choices are easy and qechanical, guided by practiced habits and rules. But when I consider a slightly novel choice, like buying a Rooqba or changing jobs or hunting tardigrades, I do deliberate, and it feels like this takes effort and that I have soqe control over the result. Even if you convince qe that it is all a grand illusion, I will still feel like I aq in control, and I will feel bad if I have no basis for condeqning behavior that appears evil to qe. If we take it as given that slavery is wrong, is there any better reason to explain why it is wrong than soqething along the lines of b_b's stateqent?
Dude, you have something seriously qrong with your keyboard. I, personally, would not use b_b’s definition because I believe that, in an absolute sense, self-determination is illusory and rights are, if not quite nonsense on stilts, then at least not worth any more respect than real people are prepared to grant them. From my perspective, what is fundamental to human beings (or any other animals with moderately advanced nervous systems) isn’t actually freedom but consciousness. Our choices are just the end products of the neuro-chemical machinery in which our decision making processes are instantiated, said machinery being constantly adjusted by our interaction with the rest of the world. You “feel” decisions are yours because your consciousness, being necessary for the assimilation of experiences, is aware of what the machinery is doing. Moral constructs like “rights,” “equality, “ etc, at that level of scrutiny, are just heuristics – rules of thumb (like lines of code) that tell a person how to interpret situations not yet encountered. I don’t assume that the wrongness of slavery is a given – if I did, why would I have entertained the question? I have reasoned, rather, that its wrongness is derivative from one or the other of two more fundamental moral propositions (freedom and equality) and, on some occasions, from a sympathetic association with the suffering of others. Ultimately, it is this latter tendency on which the whole messy, poetic, confused, humane, and sometimes beautiful edifice of moral architecture is grounded. ( --see: “Notes on Morality” http://cadwaladr.blogspot.com/2013/10/notes-on-morality_4.html )
I think it's the good ol' libertarian argument. The best decision a person can make can only be made by that person when they are well informed and not being held at any form of "gunpoint". A slave isn't free to invent, or build, or create. They are only free to do the labor they do not want to do, for someone who doesn't think that labor is important enough to pay people to do it. It leads to a massive waste in time, in labor, and in human beings. Society works best without slavery, it benefits the most without slavery, and it moves forward fastest without slavery. It is because of this, that modern society views slavery as absolutely abhorrent. Lets not also forget the fact that without slavery, without all that crap, we wouldn't have nearly as much racial tension, and society would be overall more equal in happy. It may have been good for the south in the sort term, but our former practice of slavery holds us back even to this day.