But… you just don’t want to do that anymore, because of empathy, or because you’ve come to believe in principles that say to treat all humans with dignity.
On the one hand, I think the history of abolition in Britain and the US is inspiring and many of the people involved laudable, and many of the actions taken (like the West Africa Squadron) net good for the world and worth memorializing. On the other hand, when I look around the present, I see a lot of things that (cynically) look like a culture war between elites, where the posturing is more important than the positions, or the fact that it allows one to put down other elites is more important than the fact that it raises up the less fortunate. And so when I turn that cynical view on abolition, it makes me wonder how much the anti-slavery efforts were attempts by the rich and powerful of type A to knock down the rich and powerful of type B, as opposed to genuine concern (as a probable example of the latter, John Laurens, made famous by Hamilton, was an abolitionist from South Carolina and son of a prominent slave trader and plantation owner, so abolition was probably going to be bad for him personally).
Another example of this is the temperance movement; one can much more easily make the empathetic case for banning alcohol than allowing it, I think (especially in a much poorer time, when many more children were going hungry because their father chose to spent limited earnings on alcohol instead), and yet as far as I can tell the political victory of the temperance movement was largely due to the shifting tides of fortune for various large groups, some of which were more pro-alcohol than others, rather than a sense that “this is beneath us now.”
On the one hand, I think the history of abolition in Britain and the US is inspiring and many of the people involved laudable, and many of the actions taken (like the West Africa Squadron) net good for the world and worth memorializing. On the other hand, when I look around the present, I see a lot of things that (cynically) look like a culture war between elites, where the posturing is more important than the positions, or the fact that it allows one to put down other elites is more important than the fact that it raises up the less fortunate. And so when I turn that cynical view on abolition, it makes me wonder how much the anti-slavery efforts were attempts by the rich and powerful of type A to knock down the rich and powerful of type B, as opposed to genuine concern (as a probable example of the latter, John Laurens, made famous by Hamilton, was an abolitionist from South Carolina and son of a prominent slave trader and plantation owner, so abolition was probably going to be bad for him personally).
Another example of this is the temperance movement; one can much more easily make the empathetic case for banning alcohol than allowing it, I think (especially in a much poorer time, when many more children were going hungry because their father chose to spent limited earnings on alcohol instead), and yet as far as I can tell the political victory of the temperance movement was largely due to the shifting tides of fortune for various large groups, some of which were more pro-alcohol than others, rather than a sense that “this is beneath us now.”