Hadijatou Mani was sold into slavery at the age of 12 in the Niger, one of an estimated 40,000 people in that country alone.   She was abused and even imprisoned for marrying a man who wasn’t her “master”.  This week an African court ordered her government to pay her £12,400 as compensation for failing to protect her.

 Slavery as a condition has a long history, and even Christians have been slow to condemn it.  Paul ordered the runaway slave Philemon to return to his master, and taught that “slaves should obey their masters, as though serving the Lord” (Ephesians 6:5).  The book of Leviticus has God permit Israel to take slaves from the countries surrounding them (Leviticus 25:44), and allows them to be passed on to children as inherited property.  In this respect Israel was no different from ancient civilisations such as Sparta which routinely enslaved neighbours for economic gain (and in this case, treated them abominably, for to be true Spartan you needed only to kill a Macedonian in cold blood).

 All this lends strength to the argument for moral relativism. We all think we can rise above our own culture, that we cannot be held captive by it.  But as J.L.Mackie argues (see my handout under moral relativism) , it may be forms of life  which create moral values, not moral values which create forms of life.  In other words, if we live in a society where slavery is routine, then, like Paul, we may simply accept it as normal or natural.

 Natural Law theory has a problem here.  Christians in the United States routinely supported slavery in the south because they argued that God had made the negro naturally inferior in intelligence and superior in strength.  What we observe, a difference in colour and strength was turned into a moral justification for slavery.  Remember the naturalistic fallacy: we cannot derive an ought from an is.  Here the “is” is simply a difference in colour.  The arguments about lower intelligence have been exposed as racist nonsense, and so we also concede the relativist’s point: no natural law observation is morally neutral, but conditioned by our setting in life.

 Kantian ethics  does better.  This is because the second formulation of the categorical imperative, Kant’s a priori maxim, states that we must never treat people merely as means to an end, but as an end in themselves. This means that  their choices, desires, and dignity must be taken as absolute.  Kant saw that everyone was equal in the moral relationship, and everyone had an equal say in his idea of a great moral parliament.  Kant may have forgotten about animals, but he certainly would not have allowed us to classify slaves as less than fully human.

 What about the Utilitarian?  The greatest happiness principle is also grounded on radical equality: everyone to count as one, and no-one as more than one, as Bentham put it.  Yet although the slave’s happiness may be as important as the master’s what if the majority of people (as in the southern states of America) found their happiness (wealth, leisure) greatly improved by  slavery?  Without some guarantee of universal human rights utilitarianism will always suffer from the accusation that the few can be made miserable for the benefit of the many.

 Christians have recognised that slaves must be treated as dignified human beings, but it took William Wilberforce a lifetime to convince the UK Parliament to abolish slavery in 1833.

Economic self-interest, as another form of life, frequently makes us see the world through morally-tinted glasses.

 Peter Baron  October 28^th 2008