Life as commodity

 The modern view of slavery is that it is immoral, and further that the idea of one person owning another is abhorrent and repulsive.

Okay, this is a relatively recent improvement in human moral standards, although thoughtful people through history have had qualms about it, and slavers have never been in the pinnacles of society.

Has what is "moral" changed?  The best answer I think is that slavery has been wrong all along.  It violates the most ancient and basic teachings of compassion and freedom and love.  Any rational approach to ethical deduction comes to that conclusion easily.

So what changed?   

What is right and what is wrong stay right and wrong, but human cultural views can change -- a lesson that we cannot depend on our culture to tell us and must work out our ethics for ourselves.

That is a serious and influential way of looking at moral change: not that morality itself changes, but that human beings gradually become better at recognizing it.

Philosophers sometimes call this a distinction between moral reality and moral belief. If slavery was wrong in ancient Rome, wrong in medieval Africa, wrong in the antebellum American South, and wrong today, then what changed was not the moral status of slavery but humanity's understanding of it. On this view, moral progress resembles scientific progress. The Earth did not suddenly become round when people discovered it was round; people simply came to understand reality more accurately.

Many religious and philosophical traditions have taken something like this position. A Christian might say slavery always violated the dignity of persons created in the image of God. A Buddhist might say it always conflicted with compassion and the reduction of suffering. An Enlightenment thinker might say it always violated human autonomy and equal moral worth. The underlying principle was there; society took a long time to apply it consistently.

There is another view, however, that deserves consideration. Some philosophers argue that moral standards themselves are cultural creations. On that account, slavery was not "wrong all along" in the same sense that it is wrong today. Rather, societies developed new moral concepts—human rights, universal equality, individual liberty—and those concepts changed what people regarded as moral. In that framework, moral change is more like legal change than scientific discovery.

Personally, I think the strongest challenge to the purely cultural view is that people within slave societies often recognized the problem. We can find ancient critics, religious critics, enslaved people themselves, and ordinary observers who saw the cruelty and contradiction. If morality were nothing but social convention, it is difficult to explain why people repeatedly condemned slavery before their culture did. The existence of dissent suggests that people were appealing to standards beyond local custom.

Your concluding lesson strikes me as important regardless of which theory one adopts. Culture is a guide, but it is not an infallible guide. Every society has accepted things that later generations judged harshly. The uncomfortable implication is that some practices we regard as normal today may someday appear just as obviously wrong as slavery appears to us.

That is one reason ethical reflection matters. If we simply inherit our moral beliefs from our surroundings, we are at the mercy of our era's blind spots. Whether one believes morality is discovered or constructed, there remains the responsibility to examine inherited assumptions rather than treating them as self-evidently correct.

In that sense, the abolition of slavery is not merely a historical event. It is a reminder that moral consensus and moral truth are not necessarily the same thing.

That's the uncomfortable twist, isn't it?

If the story is exactly as described, then her attempt to save the mouse was not merely unsuccessful—it was the direct cause of its death. Had she done nothing, the mouse would have remained alive, at least for the time being. By intervening, she changed the mouse's circumstances in a way that exposed it to a predator.

That doesn't necessarily make her action wrong, because she could not reasonably have foreseen an owl diving out of the sky at that moment. But it does complicate the neat distinction between intentions and outcomes. The outcome was not just unfortunate; it was causally connected to her choice.

Stories like this reveal a tension in ethics. We often judge people primarily by their intentions because outcomes depend heavily on luck. Yet outcomes matter too. If we ignored outcomes entirely, ethics would become detached from the real world.

What the story especially illustrates is the danger of assuming that intervention is automatically better than non-intervention. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it isn't. A destructive mouse in a house may face risks in the wild that it does not face indoors. The woman likely imagined two possibilities: the mouse lives in her house, causing problems, or the mouse lives elsewhere. She probably did not imagine a third possibility: the mouse becomes owl food within seconds.

There is also a broader lesson about humility. Human beings are often tempted to believe they understand all the relevant consequences of their actions. In reality, we usually see only a small part of the causal web. We act on the basis of probabilities and values, not certainty.

The mouse's perspective—if one can speak that way—would have been grimly simple. It was alive in one environment, was captured and transported by a giant creature, released, and then killed. The woman's ethical narrative and the owl's hunting narrative would have meant nothing to it.

That's one reason some philosophers place considerable weight on foreseeable consequences rather than actual consequences. If we judge solely by what happened, the woman appears to have done harm. If we judge by what a reasonable person could expect, her action may still look compassionate and sensible. The owl's appearance was a matter of bad luck, not negligence.

Still, your observation is important because it resists the comforting version of the story in which "at least she gave the mouse a chance." In the specific chain of events described, her intervention was precisely what placed the mouse where the owl could take it. Sometimes good intentions really do make things worse, even when nobody could have known they would.

"The road to Hell is paved with good intentions." When it comes to slavery, I have no problem condemning it.  When it comes to eating meat, since we are animals and need protein, I tend to limit myself to chicken and fish, but is someone serves me a hamburger at their house when I'm a guest, I will enjoy it and express appreciaton, not get huffy about the cow.

That strikes me as a fairly common way that people navigate these questions: holding strong views on some matters while treating others as questions of degree, circumstance, and competing goods.

Slavery is comparatively easy to condemn because the moral case is so overwhelming. It involves treating persons as property, denying autonomy, coercing labor, breaking families, and often inflicting violence. Once one grants that all human beings possess equal moral worth, the institution becomes very difficult to defend.

Food is murkier. Humans are omnivores by evolution. For most of history, animal protein was an ordinary part of survival, and even today nutritional needs, economics, culture, and geography all play a role in what people eat. The ethical question is not as simple as "harm versus no harm," because one is balancing human needs and preferences against animal welfare.

Your own practice sounds less like a rigid doctrine and more like an attempt to reduce harm where convenient without turning the matter into a test of virtue. You choose chicken and fish most of the time, but you also recognize the social value of hospitality. If someone has prepared a meal for you, refusing it over the animal involved may strike you as causing a different kind of harm—discourtesy toward the host.

Many moral traditions make room for that sort of judgment. Ethics is not always about maximizing a single value. Gratitude, kindness, social harmony, and respect for generosity are values too.

What I find interesting is that your position seems consistent with the theme we've been discussing. You are not saying, "Animals don't matter." Nor are you saying, "Animal life and human life are equivalent." Rather, you are acknowledging a spectrum of moral concern. The cow's welfare counts for something; the host's generosity counts for something; your own nutritional needs count for something. The challenge is deciding how to weigh them.

That differs from slavery in an important way. With slavery, many people conclude there is no balancing to be done because the violation is so profound. With meat consumption, reasonable and compassionate people can disagree about where the balance should lie.

And there is perhaps a touch of wisdom in recognizing that ethical life cannot be lived entirely in abstractions. It unfolds in actual kitchens, around actual tables, with actual people offering actual food. A philosophy that cannot survive contact with ordinary human hospitality may be missing something important about what it means to live among other human beings.

I think it was you who told me the Jains avoid root vegetables as that involves killing the plant.

Yes. Jainism is perhaps the most rigorous example of extending nonviolence toward living things.

Many Jains avoid root vegetables such as potatoes, onions, garlic, carrots, and radishes because harvesting them kills the entire plant. By contrast, picking an apple or a bean leaves the plant alive. There is also the belief that root vegetables may disturb or destroy numerous small organisms in the soil. The principle involved is ahimsa—non-harm.

What's fascinating is that Jain thinkers were well aware of the problem you raised about boundaries. They knew that life cannot exist without affecting other life. Walking kills microorganisms. Breathing kills microorganisms. Farming kills microorganisms. The goal was never absolute harmlessness, which they regarded as impossible, but minimizing harm as far as practical.

In a way, Jainism takes the concern for life to a logical extreme and then wrestles honestly with the consequences. Most of us draw the line much earlier. We may worry about mammals, perhaps birds, perhaps fish. Few of us lose sleep over bacteria.

The existence of traditions like Jainism is one reason I hesitate when people say that concern for animals is a purely modern invention. The modern animal welfare movement is recent, but the underlying intuition—that living beings other than humans deserve moral consideration—has very deep roots.

Your earlier examples illustrate why most people end up with a layered ethic rather than a single absolute rule. We value life, but we kill pathogens. We value truth, but sometimes withhold it. We value compassion, but may kill a dangerous animal. We value animal welfare, but many of us still eat meat.

That does not necessarily mean the principles are insincere. It may simply reflect the fact that human beings are constantly balancing goods against one another.

The Jain monk brushing insects from his path, the farmer protecting crops from pests, and the host serving a hamburger to a guest are all trying, in their own ways, to live ethically. They just place the boundaries in different places.

And perhaps that is what makes slavery stand out so sharply in comparison. Once you decide that the enslaved person belongs inside the circle of full human moral concern, there is very little balancing left to do. The boundary question largely disappears. With animals, plants, insects, and microorganisms, the boundary question is the entire debate.
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