Ethics and Consequences

[rowyn]

One of the kind of quirky things that I believe is that what is ethically right is also what promotes good in the long term for all involved parties. I don't mean "this is how I define what is ethically correct"; I think of "promotion of welfare" as the logical consequence of ethical behavior. The key quirk here is the "all". Some examples:

* Treating women and men as equals is in the best interests of men.
* Slave-holders are harmed by the ownership of slaves.
* Race-based oppression damages the oppressor.

And so forth. I don't think that the institution of slavery is only bad for the people enslaved or even "does enough damage to certain classes that on average humanity is better off without it". I mean it is bad for absolutely everyone including the people who appear to gain from it. This is counterintuitive, because it looks like a good deal for slave-owners, who get the benefit of the slave's labor at "no cost". Of course, "no cost" is wrong: there is the cost of feeding, clothing, and sheltering the slave (dead slaves do not produce labor). And the cost of insuring the slave remains at work, whether this is by imprisonment, guards, social conditioning, societal reinforcement, or whatever: it is not free, even if the costs are hidden to the individual slaveowner. The slave-owner will realize some short-term gain from using slaves. But if one set up two societies, identical except that one was free and one had slaves, I think that the free society would do better across every class of people in the long run; in the very long run, the poorest 10% in a free society would be weatlhier than the richest 10% in a slave-holding one.

I'm not sure this is demonstrably true in any unambiguous way. I'm pretty sure that you can make a case that some moral evils were the "best practice for success" in a given era. But I still have this feeling like the course of human history is lurching unevenly towards a better world, one with more freedom for all not just because freedom is a good thing (which it is!) but also because that's what works. That the tinpot dictators who think they can win by making everyone else lose are just wrong. Life is not a zero-sum game.

And it's an uneven, unsteady progress towards freedom because it's so counterintuitive, because the obvious thing is that if I take something from you then I have gained and you have lost, when in fact we have both lost: the benefits of what I might have made if I had not been spending my energy taking from you, or what you might have made if you did not redirect your energy towards defending from me. But bit by bit, as a race, we're figuring it out.

I think.

Comments

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

I agree with you wholeheartedly. The general principle here is that the extension of trade is a positive-sum game, while the application of force is at best a zero-sum (and usually a negative-sum) game (force is zero-sum if the weaker side surrenders without a fight, negative-sum if he must be vanquished in combat).

Employment is a positive-sum game which operates by Comparative Advantage. The employer is better served by spending his money to hire employees and his time to supervise them than he would be by doing all the work himself; the employees are better served by spending their time working for the employer to make money than they would be by trying to work for themselves. Both sides wind up richer and happier than they were before they agreed to work together.

Slavery is at most weakly positive-sum: given a good master and relatively happy slaves, it can be productive, though on the average it is less productive than free employment. It can easily become zero-sum or even negative-sum, if the slaves resist, flee or possibly even revolt. Italy in the early 1st century BC, or Haiti in the early 19th century AD, demonstrates just how horribly negative-sum it can become.

The damage which slavery does to the slaves is obvious: their lives are consumed working for the purposes of their masters, and they have no independent dignity which the master cannot strip from them at whim. To take one obvious example, in Rome a slave was sexually available to the master whenever he or she desired, with no resistance tolerated either in custom or law; despite the moderating Christianity it was almost that bad in practice in the Old South. To take another example, in both societies a slave family could be separated at the master's whim: it might even be done without his permission if the master became bankrupt.

The damage done to those in the master class are less direct and obvious, but they are still present. The masters are inevitably corrupted by the possession of theoretically absolute power over other human beings: they become increasingly arrogant, violent and coarse. The social status of any type of labor performed by slaves is degraded, and consequently less likely to be made more efficient by invention and investment (this is the flaw that doomed the CSA economy in the American Civil War). Any group which is successfully enslaved is despised by the master class: this can lead to trouble should they encounter similar groups who are not weak and vulnerable; also, the cultural innovations of that group are despised (think of the Roman rejection of the Celtic mechanical harvesters).

Slavery hurts both slave and master, even though the master may be puffing up his chest at his own inflated sense of importnace -- in fact, because he does so.

[rowyn]

Yes! Yes, this is exactly what I mean. Even when slavery is "working well", it's still not as effective free employment, and still not as rewarding for the slave-master as it is for the employer in the long term, even if the slave-master looks like he's getting a good deal in the short term.