[acdha]

> If you think you can judge someone by the morals of today, you must then accept you are evil as well, since societal morals will continue to evolve.

We can judge them by their peers at the time. The U.S. founding fathers didn’t unanimously support slavery, many of them opposed it but were committed to the idea of unity against England. Part of why we can be comfortable judging the slave owners is because their position was primarily based on greed - if we suddenly discovered that cows were sentient, a ton of people would stop eating beef but there was no doubt or ambiguity about black people in that regard, only ruthless awareness of how rich you could get without paying your workers.

[aziaziazi]

> if we suddenly discovered that cows were sentient

People eat beef mostly because they’re used to it and they think it’s good for them. Everybody knows cow are sentient, there’s a strong intuition (why wouldn’t they like other animals ?) but also tons of literature. There’s not much doubt about it neither.

I agree with the slave owners, however the spectrum of acceptance is large where it’s part of the society. What about someone that make profit by doing business with the slave owner? Someone that buy products coming ~probably~ from that work?

Or someone assisting an "indigene showcase" because they know nothing about this humanoid that look, speak and act differently than the people they used to known (that are from 100km away max). Not different than a zoo, and both are tremendously cruel.

[xvector]

Everyone knows cows are sentient (not sapient) in a way not dissimilar to a pet, everyone knows factory farming causes immense cruelty and suffering to them, our peers call this out and the text+video evidence is well documented and freely available, 20% of humans abstain, but most people eat it to satisfy their taste buds.

So the cases are not dissimilar at all because your contemporaries do call this out. If causing such immense death and suffering for pleasure in the face of easily available alternatives is not greed, what is?

You are only highlighting my point how you are seeing something as acceptable that will probably be viewed as an unspeakable cruelty in the future, and yet you feel comfortable judging past humans by an increased standard whereas you clearly are not comfortable applying an increased standard to yourself.

You are a product of your society as much as the slave owners of the past were of theirs. This is why it is senseless and hypocritical to paint past peoples acting within the accepted mores of their society as evil - as if we are any better, relatively speaking!

It makes sense to celebrate those that push things forward, as opposed to condemning those that are simply doing what they know to be normal.

[acdha]

Sorry, yes, I did mean to write sapient. I'm not sure that's a conflict, however, as much as further along a spectrum. Whether or not eating cows is ethical is possible to debate because there is valid question about how much of a mind they have but that was never honestly in question for humans. The people who kept slaves had to invent things like the “mark of Cain” theology _because_ they knew their victims were intelligent, feeling creatures like themselves and had to justify treating them in a very profitable way. All of those elaborate “the gods want this” constructions exist to get people to override their natural instinct to recognize someone as a person.

[komali2]

This point is moot because chattel slavery of humans is worse by a large degree than eating animals. We don't need to debate whether eating animals is bad, that's a distraction.

We can judge past slaveholders. The shared humanity of another human is self evident the instant you behold a slave, whether 300 years ago or 3000.

Everyone that participated was wrong to do so.

[xvector]

I think you're just deliberately being obstructionist and entirely avoiding the point I'm trying to make. Calling the core point of the argument a "distraction" is very convenient for you.

Torture is bad no matter how you cut it, and it's especially bad if you torture a sentient being for your own pleasure. Can we agree on that?

Saying whether it's better or worse than slavery is like playing the oppression Olympics, they are both atrocities and demonstrably evil actions.

When you kill an animal, you can see it struggle, cry, suffer, die. You can hold and see its pain in your hands. To do so for your taste buds is another level of evil. To make it live an entire life of suffering? That's really not much different in terms of badness.

The fact that you can't acknowledge this highlights the double standard you apply to people that came before you but not yourself. Everyone is wrong to participate in the systematic torture and murder of 70,000,000,000 sentient beings a year. Does that make all the participants evil?

[komali2]

> Saying whether it's better or worse than slavery is like playing the oppression Olympics, they are both atrocities and demonstrably evil actions.

I'm not trying to engage in oppression Olympics, I'm just saying, slavery is basically the worst things people can do, so far beyond the morality of whether or not it's ok to kill animals, or even torture them, that I'm just confused why it's brought up as if it's relevant.

I don't think killing animals is a great thing to do, and factory farms are awful. But humans are humans, and constantly just hitting this "what about animals" things is bizarre to me. I'm not trying to be rude, I just simply don't see the relevance. Slavery being just about the worse thing humans can do means that all the other bad things pale in comparison.

I'm not saying it's always valid to apply modern ethics to people from various time periods - it's bad, but understandable, that people used to beat their kids, or waste food by sacrificing animals and leaving them out to rot "for the gods." My point is that slavery simply is a massive exception, it's second-to-second murder, taking a human and trying to make them not-human. So that's why anything you could throw at me that we do today that people in the future might say is wrong - jailing people, not housing the homeless, killing animals for sport, engaging in capitalism, you name it, none of them come close to slavery in terms of sheer evil. And my point is that this isn't modern ethics, this is as self-evident a moral fact as is possible for morality. Many things in morality are grey, debatable. Not slavery. It's the One of Two things that are bad in every century, alongside rape. The wrongness of slavery, and rape, are immediately evident no matter what culture or era you come from.

And the reason people do this is usually to justify slavery. "Well they didn't know any better, so they had slaves." Justifying slavery with ANY reason is also bad. So I refuse to accept any attempt to do so, including comparisons to other things that happen to be bad, or possibly considered bad in the future.

[xvector]

I guess our difference is that I don't view the suffering of humans as any more exceptional than the suffering of other sentient beings.

[komali2]

Yes, that is then the difference.

The humanity of a human is self evident to any other human instantly. The humanity of an animal is debatable to this day. That's why slavery is inexcusably bad - the badness of it is also immediately self evident upon encountering it.