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by WalterBright 1206 days ago
That different culture will be wrong. (And I doubt their slaves agreed with them.)
1 comments

I did say "universally consider". Presumably that would only be sustainable if the slaves felt it was an arrangement that suited them.
I've never heard of slaves that were happy to be enslaved. Have you?
And the fact that there's no known good examples of slaves being happy with such an arrangement is a very strong argument in favour of any sort of right to own slaves being a unlikely sort of right that a society would ever successfully and sustainably adopt. I just wouldn't rule it out on principle - if there's anything like a "universal truth" I would accept it's that other societies/cultures need to determine their own rights for themselves, and they can't be imposed.
> I would accept it's that other societies/cultures need to determine their own rights for themselves, and they can't be imposed.

60% of society voting to enslave the other 40% does not make it right.

> they can't be imposed

They sure can be. The Union imposed freedom on the Confederacy, by force. The Allies imposed freedom on the Axis in WW2, by force.

I'm not sure the union and the confederacy saw themselves as separate cultures though? And either way, I'm not convinced that it was an acceptable use of force (granted, it's not a subject I have any great depth of knowledge in). There are parts of the world today where certain members of society live in conditions not far from slavery, and while I very much hope those societies can in time see the advantages of agreeing on and adopting a more free and equal set of human rights, I don't believe it's justified to use force to impose them just because we're so certain of their "unalienable" nature.
> I don't believe it's justified to use force to impose them just because we're so certain of their "unalienable" nature.

I don't recall any slaves that were unhappy that the US went in and freed them.

The Janissary elite drawn from the devşirme system of child levy would be the obvious example, particularly toward the end when they controlled many of the state assets and staged palace coups to get the sultan they wanted.
I.e. when they graduated from slaves to palace coups, they weren't slaves anymore.