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All the negative consequences of an immorality fall on the person who instigated the immoralty. If meritocracy is the morally correct way, then whoever introduces the notion of affirmative action bears the shame and guilt of having supplied immoral benefits to millions of people. The party which corrects a moral deficit in society is often wrongfully blamed for its negative effects. We see this with the issue of slavery and discrimination: despite every race or tribe discriminating against other races or tribes, enslaving them or worse, it’s white people who are solely blamed for black slavery in America. Yet, given that the blacks enslaved came from a culture which practiced much worse slavery, this is an absurd and ridiculous attack: the whole word bears the same “blame”, or in other words no blame at all. White people, being perhaps the first race to decide that other races do not deserve eternal subjugation, should be praised for their moral advancement, not shamed for the immorality of everyone else. This is an attribution fallacy: the bad luck of the blacks enslaved does not entail that they are victims at the hands of whites, because the blacks themselves came from a culture which believed slavery was permissible and did not have a moral argument against it. The feeling of pity for bad luck is misattributed as a harm against a group by another group.
I buy it. I’ll do one better: the ivy’s are stocked with 1st to 3rd generation Africans, not the descendants of former slaves, which means we can tell the descendants of former slaves that the descendants of their original enslavers are no longer getting wrongful benefits.
Segregation was actually a way to correct this, by completely separating the races and then putting black taxes toward black things and white taxes toward white things. But in actual fact, white funds and white resources went disproportionally toward the benefit of blacks, due to a collection of factors like military security / better policing / better development / cities etc. Were blacks actually given their own nation they would be Haiti or Liberia, but America attempted to effectually give them their own nation and allow them the fruit of white labor where it didn’t interfere with white civilization. Yeah, maybe you wince when you read that, but then I’d like to hear your argument against it: there was nothing stopping blacks from building their exclusive towns and cities in segregated America (look at the Mormons), yet they chose the obviously advantageous position of living in segregated sections of cities built by people 1000 years more developed than them. I would do the same! To get back to the point, segregation was supposed to allow blacks to compete with other blacks and whites other whites, not to put the races against each other. They were supposed to be totally separated social hierarchies (hence: segregated), not one social hierarchy. IMO this failed mostly due to really really bad argumentation on half of the segregation side, not due to anything necessarily immoral about segregation provided that one side’s majority wishes to live out their destiny separately (after all, this is literally the basis of every single polity with immigration restriction, aka most countries).
I think I see where he is going — we can effectively have white-only communities by going extreme on freedom of association, thus decreasing the social neuroticism about race. I pretty much agree that this would be good, total freedom of association for any descriptor one wants solves all the hysteria. But you will still have to face that eternally leftist voting block, the unmarried women of America who once consumed Uncle Tom’s Cabin and now consume Te Nehates Coates (sp), who believe that when people exclude other people based on heritage they are committing a racism. You need to solve that issue before you can implement some kind of extremism freedom of association policy.
It may be that I am consuming a lot of mainstream media uncritically, but I am under the impression that the KKK and so forth did a great deal of damage to American blacks creating economic centers - for example, the Tulsa Massacre.
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Your argument seems to imply that it if you abduct a child from a society in which some number of forced child brothels exist, and then keep that child in your basement and rape them every day, you haven't committed any sin because that was something that could have happened to them in their society anyway. True or false?
If someone from America goes to visit Kidfuckistan, purchases a bunch of child prostitutes, brings them to America, and starts his own child brothel, I can't imagine anyone around here arguing that he shouldn't be thrown into prison for eternity at the very least.
At the same time, once the guy was in the slammer and everything, it would be pretty weird if the kids grew up and decided they were proud Kidfuckistani-Americans and the two weeks they spent as prostitutes in the US before the FBI kicked in the door were a historically unique evil.
We have(or had) more than one actual pedophile willing to write 10,000 word manifestos about it.
Pedophile != slaver.
At least one of them ranted about how only white adult men have rights and enslaving children for their sexual gratification was therefore acceptable as long as they weren't already the property of another man. I think his name was LibertAryan or something(he was also a nazi).
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Let’s use the example of child labor. If much of the world is employing child labor — and not only that, but only some Europeans and a few select other places have developed convincing religio-philosophical arguments for why it is wrong — then if you also employ that labor you are not committing a moral infraction. Why? Because it is agreed upon as morally permissible between people, and because you have not been convinced of the philosophical argument to the contrary. (Let’s recall that the scientific view in the 19th century was that blacks were genetically inferior, and also that inferior people like the mentally ill do not necessarily have a right to freedom. The arguments against slavery were largely religious in nature, with the southerners talking about “science” in their arguments and the northerners speaking about the dignity of God’s creation).
For an action to be immoral requires (1) something approximating a consensus of norms or moral points of reference, because it is a social group which decide what is moral, and (2) the actual common knowledge that a thing being committed is immoral. The histrionic comparison of one epoch to another can get pretty silly without remembering these two things. The people of the 19th century were not magically more good or more evil, they just had a lower level of knowledge, different views on the sanctity of the individual, different inter-group norms, etc. Reading 19th century journals will convince you that, if anything, the emotional intelligence and compassion of the average middle class person was probably greater than those today. So why would it be likely thay they were more evil (in the sense of accruing blame for actions they are responsible for), versus less knowledgable?
With the slavery of Africans, given that everyone enslaved belonged to a group which practiced slavery and found it permissible, they would have behaved exactly the same way as the slavers had they the oppprtunity. Tribes enslaving other tribes. So they have no moral argument against their enslavement, in the sense that whites as a group owe them something. They were being treated according to their own principles.
Should white people have realized that black people are also humans like white people? But they eventually did, and then we had a civil war because they cared so much about it. This is run of the mill pre-20th century moral progress. It’s not like the Japanese didn’t think they were superior in the 19th century when they were killing all castaway European sailors, or the Chinese when they were killing European embassy delegations, or the Arabs when they were castrating their African slaves, etc etc.
To answer your specific qualification though,
No no, slavery was much more endemic in Western Africa than “some slavery existed”. There’s little if any evidence of serious moral knowledge that slavery is wrong in Western Africa. Remember that slavery is unfortunate is not the same as slavery is a moral wrong.
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If you apply even a modicum of charity, no, it doesn't necessarily imply that. It stands simply for the proposition that the second society (the one into which you are abducted) is not committing (in the general case) a worse sin than the first society (the one from which you were abducted), and may in fact be committing a less-worse (but still sinful) act. None of this requires anyone in either society to have purely clean hands.
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