Wrong With Slavery

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Recommended: The harms of slavery

Reading Notes from R. M. Hare’s What Is Wrong With Slavery

Main Points
In order to claim that something is wrong we must first know why it is wrong:
“There are dangers in just taking for granted that something is wrong; for we may then assume that is is obvious that it is wrong and indeed obvious why it is wrong; and this leads to a prevalence of very bad arguments with quite silly conclusions”.
Until we have a way of determining when something is/isn’t wrong “we shall be at the mercy of every kind of demagogy”. - Ignorance may lead to manipulation.
One problem with the appeal to rights as an argument is that it can often be countered with a conflicting right. Hare supports this by exposing some of the controversies in the abolishing …show more content…

“First, we have to ask what this thing, slavery, is, about whose wrongness we are arguing” - “Slavery is, primarily, a legal status, defined by the disabilities or the liabilities which are imposed by the law on those called slaves”. - Legal status may not be the same in different jurisdictions.
Slavery has different connotations in different cultures.
Requirements of being a slave - “The essential features are, I think, to be divided under two heads: slavery is, first. a status in society, and secondly, a relation to a master”.
Status - Slaves “occupies a certain place in society, lacking certain rights and privileges secured by the law to others, and subject to certain liabilities from which others are free”.
Relation to a master - A slave must be the property of somebody else, he must have a master.
Important distinction between the two - You can be of the former (lacking rights and privileges/subject to liabilities) and not be a slave. There are people of this status “but are not called slaves because they are not the slaves of …show more content…

Unless the utility “were not clearly greater, utilitarians could argue that, since all judgements of this sort are only probable, caution would require them to stick to a well-tried principle favouring liberty, the principle itself being justified on utilitarian grounds”.

Refers to the battle of Waterloo, “let us imagine, then, that the battle of Waterloo, that ‘damned nice thing, the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life’, as Wellington called it, went differently from the way it actually did go, in two respects” - 1) The British and Prussians lost the Battle. 2) “Having exposed himself to fire as Wellington habitually did, but lacking Wellington’s amazing good fortune, Napoleon was struck by a cannonball and killed instantly”.
After a series of events resulting from this alternate scenario, Hare explores how they would affect “two adjacent islands in the Caribbean which I am going to call Juba and Camaica”. - “The islands were declared independent and their government in the hands of local black leaders, some of whom were very much the

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