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#145 – Christopher Brown on why slavery abolition wasn't inevitable

80,000 Hours Podcast

CHAPTER

The Moral Intuitions of Anti-Slavery

As countries have gotten richer, there's been a trend in people's opinions where they tend to place more weight on the care, harm and fairness moral intuitions. A common element in anti-slavery argument is what you've identified as the harm sort of access. The whole idea of gender equality in the 19th century and women's rights comes directly out of the fight against slavery. And it would be interesting to see if that causal sequence is more complicated than that model would seem to suggest.

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Speaker 2
Then there's fairness cheating, which sort of reciprocity, we got the liberty versus oppression, authority and subversion. Fifth one is kind of loyalty and betrayal. And the sixth one is sanctity degradation. So something about spirituality. Now, ideally, this is just intended to be kind of a neutrally descriptive. It's almost like a personality test of seeing like how strongly do you feel these different these different moral intuitions. And on this one, it seems like as countries have gotten richer, there's been a trend in people's opinions where they tend to place more weight on the care, harm and fairness, cheating moral intuitions, and somewhat less, all right, and also sometimes on the liberty, oppression, access, and somewhat less on authority, a bit less on loyalty, and a bit less on sanctity, degradation, spirituality, and so on. And if that general trend were true, then you might think that that it seems like concern about fairness and harm are the moral intuitions that are most going to push people towards abolitionism. And perhaps it's only the belief in authority and hierarchy, that kind of moral intuition, that could ever really cause people to think that that slavery could be acceptable. And so, yeah, if you did have this trend towards people placing greater weight on those moral intuitions, then perhaps that would have over time caused people to become less favorable towards
Speaker 1
slavery. Do you have any reactions to that? Yeah, I'm thinking about that. I'm thinking about that. Certainly a feature of anti-slavery thought and a common element in anti-slavery argument, especially in England, is what you've identified as the harm sort of access. There's a lot of propaganda, anti-slavery pamphlets that emphasize the cruelty, emphasize the barbarity, emphasize the physical violence, emphasize the suffering, as the reason to care, and then the reason to act. And on the fairness part, sometimes that expresses itself in the notion of human equality, and therefore the importance of that equality means that the treatment, the grounds of which people are treated, that's going to go some ways into the equality under law, right? And those are elements that are in anti-slavery argument. But I would go back to the question in my mind is that are they prior, or are they posterior consequences of anti-slavery movements? Because these are not, as you say, these are in some ways are not new. The harm one is actually very interesting because in the 18th and early 19th century, in Anglo-American culture, there is a real turn against the most bloody of punishments, right? Capital punishment goes into behind closed doors, is no more hanging trees, the whole sort of drawing and quartering people, the most dramatic displays of torturing and destroying the human body. All those things become too squeamish for people over the course of the 18th and long 19th century. And the turn against slavery is part of that. I agree with that. But I guess my question is, is the anti-slavery movement the product of that, or a cause of it, right? Does it facilitate the growth of that culture of sensibility? Or does it arise from it? And I think it's as much a contributor to that ethos as it is. I mean, to give you a very concrete example, the lash in the royal navy, right? It could be whipped 70, 80 times. We think about whipping on the plantations as something that happens to slaves, but sailors could be whipped basically to the up to and sometimes to their death, and captains would be legitimate and have the right to do so. The turn against whipping in the navy is in part a consequence against the turn against whipping and slavery. It's not that the things that you're describing don't occur. It's that I think the causal sequence, we sometimes, I think that's causal sequence is more complicated than that model would seem to suggest. Let me just give one other example, just occur to me. The whole idea of gender equality in the 19th century and women's rights comes directly out of the campaign against slavery, right? And so again, I think anti-slavery serves as a progenitor of new ideas of equality, as much as it is a product of them. And it would be interesting to think about, and here's a counterfactual for you, what does the movement for women's rights look like in the 19th century, if the campaign against slavery had never existed? And I would argue that it's actually, that there's, I think there would have been a movement, or there would have been a movement towards greater equality, but it was certainly galvanized and learned a lot of lessons from the anti-slavery movement.

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