Ethics and slavery

Introduction

Ethics and slavery

Slavery can broadly be described as the ownership, buying and selling of human beings for the purpose of forced and unpaid labour.

Slavery is one of the things that everyone agrees is unethical. In fact there is such general agreement that most people would probably say that 'slavery is wrong just because it's wrong'.

Even those who practice slavery don't usually try to defend it - they make excuses or attempt to avoid being caught; which suggests that they know that they are doing wrong.

Why is slavery wrong?

Although slavery does seem 'obviously wrong' it's worth listing some of the reasons why it's wrong.

• Slavery increases total human unhappiness
• The slave-owner treats the slaves as the means to achieve the slave-owner's ends, not as an end in themselves
• Slavery exploits and degrades human beings
• Slavery violates human rights: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights explicitly forbids slavery and many of the practices associated with slavery

• Slavery uses force or the threat of force on other human beings
• Slavery leaves a legacy of discrimination and disadvantage
• Slavery is both the result and the fuel of racism, in that many cultures show clear racism in their choice of people to enslave
• Slavery is both the result and the fuel of gender discrimination
• Slavery perpetuates the abuse of children

History of slavery

The puzzle of slavery

People often think that slavery was always good for the slave owners in that it provided them with a pool of cheap labour. While this was sometimes true, slavery also brought a number of problems for canny business-people:

• Capital is required up-front to buy the slaves
• Recruitment costs can be high if slaves run away or die and must be replaced
• Supervision and guarding costs are high
• Slaves are often un-productive, either deliberately or because of poor conditions

So slave labour was not always an obvious choice; its particular value came when labour was hard to get, and war or traders were offering slaves at a price that made sense.

The lower the price of slaves, the more likely they were to be ill-treated, since they could be readily and cheaply replaced.

In some countries the ending of slavery did great damage to particular industries, demonstrating that slavery had kept prices artificially low and giving a clear early warning that the pressure on global prices could have a bad effect on human rights.

Slavery was a very common practice

Slavery may be wrong but it's occurred almost everywhere and from ancient times:

• Religious texts in Judaism, Islam and Christianity all recognise slaves.
• The Mayans and Aztecs kept slaves in the Americas.
• The Sumerians and Babylonians kept slaves in the Near East.
• The Egyptians kept huge numbers of slaves, including the Jews, Europeans and Ethiopians.
• The Greeks and Romans kept slaves as soldiers, servants, labourers and even civil servants.
• The Romans captured slaves from what are now Britain, France and Germany.
• The Ottomans and Egyptians kept slaves and used slave armies.
• In Africa there were a number of societies and kingdoms which kept slaves before there was any regular commercial contact with Europeans, including the Asanti, the Kings of Bonny and Dahomey.
• In Imperial Russia in the first half of the 19th century one third of the population were serfs, who, like slaves in the Americas, had the status of chattels and could be bought and sold.

In 1807, Britain declared all slave trading illegal. The king of Bonny (in what is now the Nigerian delta) was dismayed at the conclusion of the practice.

The Russian serfs were freed in 1861 by Emperor Alexander II.

Four years later slavery was abolished in the southern states of America following the Southern defeat in the American Civil War.

Find out more

• Buddhism and slavery
• Christianity and slavery
• Islam and slavery