Abstract
The institution of slavery is an unjust institution. The aim of this paper is to provide an explanation of why it is unjust. I argue that slavery is unjust because it makes it impossible for slaves to realise both their interest in self-respect and their interest in being at home in the world. Furthermore, I argue that this explanation of the injustice of slavery also provides us with an argument for political equality.
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Notes
This description is not intended to spell out the necessary and sufficient conditions for this form of slavery, but merely to indicate the basic form of slavery that I am concerned with here.
For an overview of slavery in the U.S., see Kolchin (1993).
Of course, we could imagine a theory of recognition self-respect that did not include this idea of equality of persons. In this case, to have recognition self-respect would just be to attribute to oneself the value which one in fact has.
Although Hill does not use the term recognition self-respect, Darwall clearly has in mind Hill’s examples in his discussion of recognition self-respect. See Darwall (1977).
On the other hand, if she refuses to assert her moral equality because she is afraid that doing so will result in her husband beating her, then we are likely to judge the case differently.
I need not endorse these principles for the same reasons that the principles were chosen. All that is required for being at home in the world is that I endorse the principles, not that I also endorse the grounds on which the principles were chosen.
It may be that I do not think that Rawls’ two principles are the best possible principles of justice, but that I nonetheless endorse institutions governed by them because I acknowledge that the two principles constitute a reasonable interpretation of the two higher-level principles that I do fully endorse, namely freedom and equality. Thus, I can be at home in the world even when I believe that the principles that govern the institutions to which I am subject are imperfect, so long as I believe that they are reasonable. Thanks to Jonathan Seglow and an anonymous reviewer for bringing this to my attention.
To put these points in Hampton’s terminology, the slave who comes to believe that she is inherently less valuable has had the experience of being degraded. The slave who retains her self-respect, on the other hand, does not have the experience of being degraded but rather of being demeaned; she feels as though she is being treated as though her value is lower than she perceives it as being. Endorsing the institutions that enslave her thus requires that she not merely endorse this demeaning treatment, but that she no longer perceives the treatment as demeaning. Rather she sees the treatment as befitting her status as a slave. See Hampton (1988).
This example was suggested to me by Robert Young.
Although such a case is unlikely, for the purposes of this argument all that matters is that it is possible.
This objection is courtesy of Thomas Christiano.
The slave might, for instance, believe something like the thesis suggested by Williams (1944).
Note that this point rules out ‘government house’ utilitarianism, where the principles of justice are not revealed to the citizens. This is ruled out because it would result in the alienation of all citizens; they would have false beliefs about the principles that underlie the institutions. See e.g. Sidgwick (1981, pp. 480–492); Williams (1973, pp. 138–140).
Institutions of slavery tended to vary greatly in the rights that they accorded to slaves. The Alabama slave code of 1852, for example, prohibited the killing or ‘cruel punishment’ of slaves, and required that they be provided with sufficient food, clothing, and health care. In practice, however, these rights were very rarely enforced, in part due to the fact that slaves lacked the right to testify against whites. Where they were enforced, it was often in cases where the slave owners brought cases against other whites for damaging their slaves. I think that the best way to think of such situations is to say that, although slaves had at least some formal rights, the fact that these rights were almost never enforced except when the interests of other non-slaves were harmed expresses the idea that these rights are not really rights at all. In such cases where the institutions are so profoundly inconsistent, I suspect that no one can be at home in the world since this would require that one endorses a contradiction. See Kolchin (1993, pp. 127–132).
For a discussion of the relationship between voting, civil rights, and political equality, see Christiano (2004, p. 275).
The argument for equality that I am proposing here bears some similarity to one discussed by Scanlon (2003). Scanlon argues that one reason to think that institutions ought to treat people equally is that unequal treatment can cause those treated as inferiors to feel inferior (p. 204). Although I think that such a causal claim is very plausible, an argument of this sort does not provide us with a strong defence of the value of equality as such, since it would provide us with no grounds on which to object to the unequal treatment of those people in whom such feelings of inferiority were not engendered. This is not true of the argument that I have given above.
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to Thomas Christiano, Michael Gill, Iwao Hirose, Joel Martinez, Jeremy Moss, Stefan Sciaraffa, Mark Timmons, Robert Young, several anonymous referees, and audiences at the Melbourne Program in Political Philosophy, the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics in Melbourne, and the Australasian Association of Philosophy Conference for comments on previous versions of this paper.
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Roberts-Thomson, S. An Explanation of the Injustice of Slavery. Res Publica 14, 69–82 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-008-9054-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-008-9054-2