I suppose I could get someone to brush my teeth, but it’s actually easier if I do it myself. But there are things I can’t do for myself, like get at that damn knot in the middle of my back. When I do need, or at least want, someone to do something for me, there are, by my count, four ways I can get her to do so. 1) I can appeal to her compassion. That’s how I get my wife to make me carrot cake. 2) I can appeal to our sharing a common cause. That’s how I get you to help defend our trench against the enemy assault. 3) I can pay you for your time and labour in aid of some druther. Or 4) I can threaten you with some dire consequence if you don’t. And the great mystery – at least it’s a mystery to me – is why none of the first three is deemed morally problematic, but the fourth is. That is, why is a yoked ox perfectly acceptable, but a galley slave is not?
Some evolutionary ethicists think it has something to do with mirror neurons, but if so that would be a pretty recent adaptation. Others think we should love one another because we’re all children of God and God loves us all. But since the ‘because’ is a premise indicator, the conclusion is a complete non-sequitur. Some people think … No, let’s not waste our time. The fact is they don’t think. That slavery is wrong – notwithstanding there’s never been a polity that hasn’t practised it – is just an article of faith. And at that a fairly recent one.
Galley slaves are held in their place by chains, and encouraged in their task by whips and the hope of food. Not so the field slave. One can’t pick cotton while manacled. He’s held to his servitude by having no other way to feed himself. Which is what lead Karl Marx to conclude, quite rightly, that working for a wage is just a species of slavery. And once that’s acknowledged, it’s hard to find a human enterprise that isn’t. A species of slavery, that is. And if pretty much everything is, then, along with the concept of coercion, slavery loses its meaning.
What we want to say – as we do about “Your wallet or your life!” – is not that the threat to worsen one’s condition undermines her freedom, but rather that there are certain choices that morally ought not to be proffered. Are these verboten choices universal? Clearly not. Work for little more than room and board or starve to death! is pretty much standard in much of the world. That it’s not in our so-called First World is probably because here labour ‘enjoys’ a shortage of itself. Let the Third World in, or repeal all tariffs, or cut social services, and … That’s why American workers now vote Republican. It’s not rocket science, people. It’s just being heartlessly savvy. But I digress.
I say I digress because what I really want to agonise about in this entry is not slavery, but gratitude. Can an African American be grateful – should an African American be grateful – to those of his own race, namely other Africans, who kidnapped his ancestors and sold them to the traders who sold them to the plantation owners who held their progeny in servitude until the Emancipation Proclamation and beyond? After all, by any reasonable measure, the quality of life of the average African American today is orders of magnitude superior to that of the average African whose ancestors were left in place. And isn’t that superiority what we normally count as grounds for thankfulness?
The same argument can be made about rape. It wouldn’t take much reflection to confirm that each of us, without exception, is the product of rape. So though we disapprove of rape, we don’t disapprove of the rapes that gave rise to us. I could go on and on and on. So consider that I have. Okay, so clearly something’s gone wrong here. But what?
What’s gone wrong – or so you might argue – is that though you’re glad to be alive, or to enjoy the privileges you do, you’d prefer that your being alive, or your enjoying the privileges you do, came about other than it did. That your African ancestors came here willingly, looking for a better life. Fair enough. But then they wouldn’t have been your ancestors. That your great great grandfather’s mother’s conception of him was consensual rather than forced. Fair enough. But then he wouldn’t have been your great great grandfather.
Too quick. Or at least maybe too quick. By parity of reasoning, if you hadn’t run that red light you wouldn’t have got a ticket. No, because you just are the person who ran that red light and got a ticket. The person who didn’t wouldn’t have been you. But denying that person remains you would make nonsense out of every counterfactual. But we can’t have that. So neither can we have it that you couldn’t have been the progeny of voluntary immigration or the product of consensual sex.
Too quick. Somewhere between your genetic makeup and your running a red light we have to decide what does and doesn’t count as identity-preserving. I want to say – and the courts agree with me – that running a red light preserves your identity, whereas a completely different genetic makeup does not. So no, I could not have been born black, or as a woman, or … The list goes on. But not on and on.
Is there a principled way we can end the list? There is not. And that there is not sits at the core of so many of our unresolvable disputes. You want compensation for slavery? Payable to Africans on which side of the Atlantic? You think exception should be allowed for cases of rape? Well, if they shouldn’t be born then neither should you have been. The list goes on. And it goes on and on!
This is what happens when philosophers are allowed to press on our moral intuitions. We end up with conceptual chaos. This is why we need to get rid of people like Socrates. And me.
Categories: Angst, Critical Thinking, Social and Political Philosophy
Paulosophical Vimplications 
Leave a comment