The Arc of the Moral Universe

This article analyses Enlightenment ideas and nation-making practices in the American Civil War and pre-War civil societies. It analyses African American mobilization and the abolitionist movement, and Lincoln’s role in war, reconciliation and development. The international context is investigated in a case for relational nation making. The role of non-violent mobilization is assessed. It examines the war’s social revolutionary implications. The war’s unprecedented violence anticipated 20th century total war, fundamentally deciding the republic’s future. State/civil society interactions, and changes in public moral perception, reshape longstanding institutional arrangements, and decide core ethical issues including the meaning of humanity.

This reflection will revolve around that which returns and which arrives in history. Following this approach to history and historical events, the traditional dichotomies or classical concepts of the philosophy of history-contingency and necessity; particularity and universality; accident and essence; destiny; teleology; reason in history, eschatology, etc.-will appear rather inappropriate. Indeed, we will attempt to develop a relation to history capable of engaging with the singularity of events, which is precisely to say those events which return from the past and arrive from the future to incessantly haunt our present. We shall seek to deploy the philosophical signification of the Derridian idea of spectre in order to approach those events which return to our present as if they arrived from the future and those events arriving to our present from the future which remain impossible to simply put in the past. In this respect, the traditional dichotomies just mentioned will be seen to emerge from one apparently unshakable and unquestionable opposition which we are here to deconstruct, namely the opposition between life and death, between the living and the dead. Our attempt, therefore, to develop a novel approach of history, one which tackles the irreducible singularity of historical events, both past and future, will also entail and engage in a rethinking of the dichotomy between life and death, between what is meant by the living and what is meant by the dead, both past and future. Historical events, according to us, relentlessly produce spectres which take hold of our present and for which the different economies and signifiers through which they are rendered graspable, representable, archivable and treatable in a general narrative of reason or meaning-and where historical consciousness can furnish the conditions of possibility to "come to terms" with these very events and history as a whole-will appear inoperative. We will demonstrate how and why the present and hence our relation to the representation of our historical present remain perpetually "out of joint" and haunted by a disarticulation of temporality:

JOSHUA COHEN zyxw z The Arc of the Moral Universe Through all the sorrow of the Sorrow Songs there breathes a hope-a faith in the ultimate justice of things. The minor cadences of despair change often to triumph and calm confidence. Sometimes it is faith in life, sometimes a faith in death, sometimes assurance of boundless justice in some fair world beyond. But whichever it is, the meaning is always clear: that sometime, somewhere, men will judge men by their souls and not by their skins. Is such a hope justified? Do the Sorrow Songs sing true? W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Sorrow Songs”’ I. ETHICALEXPLANATION William Williams was born into slavery in Salisbury, North Carolina. He escaped to Canada in 1849, where he was later interviewed by the American abolitionist Samuel Gridley Howe. It was two years into the American Civil War, and Williams said: “I think the North will whip the South, because I believe they are in the right.”* zyxwvu This essay, which will appear in Subjugation and Bondage, ed. Tommy Lott (Rowman and Littlefield,forthcoming), is from a larger manuscript I worked on for several years, then put aside. I wrote the first draft for a 1986 symposium on “Moral Realism” at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, and presented subsequent versions to philosophy colloquia at Carnegie-MellonUniversity and Columbia University, the Western Canadian Philosophical Association, the Harvard Government Department’s political theory colloquium, New York University Law School, the Pacific Division meetings of the American Philosophical Association, the Bay Area Group on Philosophy and Political Economy, the Society for Ethical and Legal Philosophy, an Olin Conference on Political Economy at Stanford University, the A. E. Havens Center for the Study of Social Structure and Social Change (University of Wisconsin, Madison), and the Universidade Federal Fluminens. I am grateful to audiences at each occasion for comments and criticism. I especially wish to thank Robert Brenner, David Brink, Robert Cooter, Michael Hardimon, Paul Horwich, Frances Kamm, George Kateb, Ira Katznelson, Harvey Mansfield, Amelie Rorty, Charles Sabel, Michael Sandel, T. M. Scanlon, Samuel Scheffler, Anne-Marie Smith, Laura Stoker, and Erik Olin Wright for helpful suggestions. Karen Jacobsen,AnneMarie Smith, and Katia Vania provided invaluable research assistance. I received research support from a National Endowment for the Humanities summer fellowship, and MIT’s Levitan Prize in the Humanities, generously supported by James and Ruth Levitan. 1. The Souls ofBluck Folk (New York Vintage, iggo), p. 188. 2. Cited in John W. Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, ig77), p. 437. zyxwvut 92 zy zyxwvutsr Philosophy G Public Affairs Williams’s remark provides a striking example of an ethical explanation. Generally speaking, ethical explanations cite ethical norms-for example, norms of justice-in explaining why some specified social facts obtain, or, as in Williams’s case, can be expected to obtain. The norms are offered in explanations of social facts, not only in appraisals of them: Williams expects the North to win because they are right.3 Similarly, the great abolitionist minister Theodore Parker predicted defeat for the “slave power” because it was wrong: Speaking to the New England Anti-Slavery Convention in 1858, he said of the slave power: “Its Nature of wickedness is its manifest Destiny of Ruin.”4 Philosophers, historians, and social scientists often recoil from ethical explanations: How could the injustice of slavery contribute to explaining its demise? Or the justice of sexual subordination to explaining the instability of systems that subordinate women? Or the injustice of exclusion from the suffrage to explaining twentieth-century suffrage extension? Such explanations seem both too relaxed about distinctions between fact and value and too Panglossian: Does right really make might? Still, ethical explanations play an important role in certain common-sense schemes of social and historical understanding: they are elements of certain folk moralities, so to speak. Martin Luther King said zyxwv z zyxwvut zyxwv 3. For philosophical endorsement of ethical explanations, see Plato, Republic, trans. Allan Bloom (New York Basic Books, 1968), 509B; G.W.E Hegel, Lesser Logic, trans. William Wallace (Oxford Oxford University Press, 18921, paragraph 234. Contemporary philosophical discussion of ethical explanations is set within the context of debates about moral realism and moral objectivity. See, among much else, Gilbert Harman, The Nature of Morality (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 19771, esp. Chap. 1; Nicholas Sturgeon, “Moral Explanations,” in David Copp and David Zimmerman, eds., Morality, Reason, and Truth: New Essays on theFoundations ofEthics (Totowa: Rowman and AUanheld, 1985), pp. 49-78; Peter Railton, “Moral Realism,” Philosophical Review 95, no. 2 (April 1986): 163-207; Warren Quinn, “Truth and Explanation in Ethics,” Ethics 96 (April 1986): 522-44; Thomas Nagel, The View From Nowhere (Oxford Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. i44ff.; David Brink, Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Crispin Wright, Truth and Objectivity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, igg2), Chap. 5; Judith Jarvis Thomson, “Moral Objectivity,” in Gilbert Harman and Judith Jarvis Thomson, Moral Relativism and Moral Objectivity (Cambridge, Mass. and Oxford Blackwell, 1996). I comment on the connections of my argument with this debate in the text a t pp. 95-96. 4. Theodore Parker, The Relation of Slavery to a Republican Form of Government (Boston: William Kent and Company, 1858), p. 20. Strictly speaking, Williams and Parker make ethical predictions: they predict a change in a world, and base the predictions on norms of rightness. No doubt they would have embraced the claim that the North won because it was in the right. 93 zyxw zy zyxwvuts The Arc of the Moral Universe that “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.”S If there is an arc, King is right about its length. But is there one that bends toward justice? Do the Sorrow Songs sing true? More immediately, do ethical explanations withstand reflective examination, or are they simply collages of empirical rumination and reified hope, pasted together with rhetorical flourish? I think that some ethical explanations-for example, about slavery, sexual subordination, and suffrage extension-have force. That force derives from the general claim that the injustice of a social arrangement limits its viability. This general claim rests in turn on the role played by the notion of a voluntary system of social cooperation in plausible accounts of both justice and the long-term viability of social forms. Social arrangements better able to elicit voluntary cooperation have both moral and practical advantages over their more coercive counterparts.6 This theme lies at the basis of Enlightenment theories of history: Adam Smiths account of the pressures that encourage the emergence of a system of natural liberty,7 Hegel’s account of the instabilities of social systems that enable only incomplete forms of human self-consciousness,8 and Marx’s thesis that exploitative social relations ultimately give way because of the constraints they impose on the free development of human powers.9 Enlightenment historical sociology was too sanguine about the importance of the connection between justice and viability in accounting for historical change, insufficiently attentive to the grim side of such change, and of course unaware of (and unprepared for) this century’s carnage. Nevertheless,there may be something to the connection. zyxwv 5. The phrase “arc of the moral universe” or variants on it occur throughout King’s writing and speeches. See Martin Luther King, A Testamentof Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, J E , ed. James Washington (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1986), pp. 141, 207, ago, 277, 438. According to Taylor Branch, the phrase comes from Theodore Parker. See Parting the Waters:America in the King Years 1954-63 (New York Simon and Schuster, 1988),p. ig7n. 6. For suggestive discussion, see Jiirgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, i975), Part 3; and Jurgen Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society,trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979). 7 . Adam Smith, Weulth ofNutiom (New York Random House, 19651, Book 3. 8. G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of History, trans. J, Sibree (New York Dover, 1900). 9. Karl Marx, “Preface” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, and Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, German Ideology, in Robert Tucker, ed., Marx-EngelsReader, and ed. (New York Norton, 19781, pp. 4-5, 146-200. 94 zyx zyx zyx zyxwvutsrq Philosophy G. Public Affairs zy To argue the case that there is, I will sketch, in very spare terms, an argument for a thesis that is broader than William Williams’s claim about the outcome of the American Civil War, but not quite so sweeping as the general claim about the connections between justice and Viability: that the injustice of slavery contributed to its demise. I will defend this claim by arguing for the following four: Thesis One: The basic structure of slavery as a system of power stands in sharp conflict with fundamental slave interests in material wellbeing, autonomy, and dignity. Thesis Two: Slavery is unjust because the relative powerlessness of slaves, reflected in the conflict between slavery and slave interests, implies that it could not be the object of a free, reasonable, and informed agreement. Thesis Three: The conflict between slavery and the interests of slaves is an important source of the limited viability of slavery. Thesis Four: Characterizing slavery as unjust conveys information relevant to explaining the demise of slavery that is not conveyed simply by noting that slavery conflicts with the interests of slaves. I will start by setting out some background claims about the nature of slavery and the bases of its reproduction as a system (Section 11). Then I present a defense of the ethical explanation by presenting some considerations in support of these four theses (Section 111). The presentation throughout is relatively bloodless and highly abstract: I am largely inattentive to the sheer murderousness of slavery, the gruesome slave trade, and the infinite variety of forms of slavery. These qualities are dictated in part by the problem of squeezing a large claim into a small space, but they also reflect the content of my principal thesis, which requires that I work with a very general characterization of slavery. I know that such abstractness has costs, but the remarks of Williams, Parker, King, and Du Bois persuade me that the claim is sufficiently important to outweigh those costs. Before getting to the argument, though, I want to clarify its aims by distinguishing my concerns from those in two related debates, one in history, the other in philosophy. First, my focus here is on the role (if any) played by the injustice of slavery in explaining the ultimate demise zyxwvutsr zyxwvu 95 The Arc of the Moral Universe of slavery. Slavery is unjust-as Lincoln said, “If slavery is not wrong, then nothing is wrong”1O-and it has been abolished. But did its wrongness contribute to its demise? Historians continue to debate the role of moral convictions about the injustice of slavery-held, for example, by Quakers-in accounting for the abolition of slavery?I I do not doubt the causal importance of these convictions, much less their sincerity. Indeed, I will eventually make them part of the story about how the injustice of slavery contributed to its demise. But my topic is different. I am not concerned principally with the causal importance of moral convictions in the decline of slavery but the importance of the injustice itself in accounting for that demise. In short, I am concerned with the consequences of slavery’s injusticewhether “Its Nature of wickedness is its manifest Destiny of Ruin”-and not simply the consequences of the fact that some people came to think of it as wrong. Second, some philosophers-they might be called “scientific moral realists”-have argued that the objectivity of moral discourse depends on there being substantial moral facts and that establishing the existence of such facts requires that we show a role for them in the causal explanation of human behavior, moral beliefs, social evolution, or some other nonmoral facts about the world.’” Scientific moral realism seems to me a mistaken view about moral facts, truth, and objectivity.But I will not argue this claim here because my concerns are more or less orthogonal to the debate about its merits. I am not aiming to defend morality, show that slavery was immoral, or argue for any particular philosophical zy zyxw zyx zyxwvu zyxwvut 10. Quoted in David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis: 1848-1861, completed and edited by Don E. Fehrenbacher (New York: Harper and Row, 19761, p. 342. The passage comes from Lincoln’s letter to Albert G. Hodges (April 4,1864). 11. For criticism of explanations of the decline of ancient slavery in which religious morality plays a central role, see Keith Bradley, Slavery und Society at Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 19941, Chap. 8;Pierre Dock&, MedievaE Slavery and Liberarion, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 19821, pp. 145-49; G.E.M. de Ste. Croix , The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World (London: Duckworth, 1981).For recent debate on the complexities of assessing the contribution of moral convictions to modern abolitionism,see the debate between John Ashworth, David Brion Davis, and Thomas Haskell, in TheAntislaveryDebate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation, ed. Thomas Bender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). 12. On scientific moral realism, see Sturgeon, “Moral Explanations”;Brink, Moral Realism;and especially Railton’s excellent “Moral Realism.” 96 zyxw zy zyxwvutsr Philosophy G. Public Affuirs theory about morality or moral objectivity. Instead, I begin from within morality, premise slavery’s injustice, note the practice of ethical explanation, and ask whether there is anything to a particular instance of that practice: the claim-made by Williams and Parker, among others-that the injustice of slavery contributed to its demise. What is at stake is not the appropriate moral attitude toward slavery or philosophical outlook on morality, but the appropriate attitude toward the social world. How accommodating is the social world to injustice? Is it reasonable, from a moral point of view, to hate the world? Having drawn this distinction, however, I need to supplement it with two observations-one about the assumptions of my argument, one about its implications- that do bear on debates about moral realism. First, a defense of ethical explanations is not necessary to showing that some moral claims are true, or, correspondingly, that there are moral facts. So when I assume that some moral claims are true-in particular, that “slavery is unjust” states a truth and expresses a fact-I am not begging any questions against the critic of ethical explanations. Second, the ethical explanation I will defend is consistent with a minimalist outlook in morality, according to which moral claims can be assessed as true or false, and true moral claims correspond, as a matter of platitude, to moral facts. No more substantial commitment to moral realism is required, nor is any implied.’s Thus, a defense of ethical explanations is neither necessary for moral truth, nor suficient for establishing a robust form of moral realism. zyxwvu My argument that the injustice of slavery contributed to its demise depends on several background ideas about slavery and slave interests. Briefly summarized, I propose that slavery is a distinctive distribution of de facto power, that this distribution was reproduced through both force and “consent,” and that patterns in the use of force and strategies for inducing consent provide a basis for attributing to slaves basic interests in material well-being, autonomy, and dignity. Though these ideas are not uncontroversial, I am unable here to defend them properly. But I need to say something about them-about slavery as a framework, and 13. Here I follow Crispin Wright’s discussion of moral explanations and minimalism in Truth and Objectivity, Chap. 5. 97 zyxw zyxwvuts The Arc of the Moral Universe zy zyxwv slaves as agents-both make it plausible. to explain the terms of the argument, and to Power Slavery is best understood, I suggest, in terms of the notion of de fact0 power, rather than, for example, in terms of familiar cultural or legal representations of slaves-as extensions of the will of masters, or as pr0perty.~4To be specific: a slave is, in the first instance, someone largely lacking the power to dispose of hidher physical and mental powers, including both the capacity to produce and control of the body generally (extending to sexuality and reproduction); the power to dispose of the means of production; the power to select a place a residence; the power to associate with others and establish stable bonds; the power to decide on the manner in which one’s children will be raised; and the (political) power to fix the rules governing the affairs of the states in which one resides. Slaves are distinguished from other groups-helots, serfs, sharecroppers, poor but propertied peasants, and propertyless proletarians-by the combination of the breadth and depth of the limits on their powers. The limits extend over all aspects of life, the restrictions cut deeply into each aspect, and there is a corresponding breadth and depth to the powers that others have over them. When I say that these powers of slaves were greatly confined, I mean to indicate that there were a wide range of activities (including those using the powers just enumerated) that slaves were required to engage 14. For general discussions of the nature of slavery see Ste. Croix, Class Struggle, esp. p. 135,where he discusses the definition of slavery in the 1926 Slavery Convention organized by the League of Nations; H. J. Nieboer, Slavery as an Industrial System, 2nd ed. (NewYork Burt Franklin, 1910 [1971Reprint]), Part I, Chap. 1; Orlando Patterson, slavery and Social Death, Chaps. 1-3; Dockbs, Medieval Slavery, pp. 4-8; Moses Finley, Ancient Slavery and Mudern IdeuZogy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, ig80),Chap. 2;Moses Finley, Economy and Society in Ancient Greece (Harmondsworth:Penguin, 19831,Chaps. 6-9; Igor Kopytoff and Suzanne Miers, “African Slavery as an Institution of Marginality,”in Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff, eds., Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, ign),pp. 3-81; “Slavery as an Institution: Open and Closed Systems,”in James Watson, ed., Asian and Afican Systems of Slavery (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980);Paul Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery:A History of Slavery in Africa (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 19831,Chap. 1; James Oakes, Slavery and Freedom: An fnterpretation of the Old South (New York Alfred Knopf, 19901,Chap. 1. The conception of slavery I present in the text draws as well on the discussion of “property relations” in G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History:A Defense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978),pp. 219-22. zyxwv zyxw 98 zyxw zyx zyx zyxwvutsr Philosophy C Public Affairs zy in if the master sought to require them (e.g., sexual intercourse), or de fact0 prevented from pursuing at all if their master wanted to prevent them; or if they had some possibility of pursuing activities against the will of their master (e.g., selecting a place of residence by running away, withdrawing labor power by feigning illness, fixing the rules of association by establishing an independent “maroon” community, selecting a sexual partner by saying “no”),then the likelihood of success was small and the costs of failure (public humiliation, corporal punishment, death) were very great. But slaves were not entirely powerless-mere extensions and instruments of another’s will.’5 To be sure, their power was highly confined, dangerous to exercise, and nearly always insufficient to overturn slavery itself. But slaves did not, as a general matter, lack all forms of power, and sometimes asserted it to improve their conditions and shape the terms of order within the framework of slavery. As an ex-slave and blacksmith named J. W. Lindsay put it in an 1863 interview with the Freedman’s Inquiry Commission, “Of course, they treated me pretty well, for the reason that I would not allow them to treat me in any other way. If they attempted to use any barbarity, I would walk off before their faces.”IG Though Lindsay’s remark is almost certainly an exaggeration, and certainly not a plausible generalization, it captures a truth put more subtly by Harriet Jacobs, who said, “My master had power and law on his side; I had a determined will. There is might in each.”l7 The power of slaves was most clearly in evidence in the range of activities commonly grouped together as “slave resistance”:’* zyxw zy 15. Bradley says that “TOlive in slavery . . . was to be utterly disempowered.” But he backs this assertion with observations about the absence of slave rights and master obligations, thus running together the relations of power with legal-cultural representations. See Bradley, Slavery and Sociely, p. 27. 16. Blassingame, Slave Testimony, p. 397. 17. Cited in Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill University of North Carolina Press, ig88), p. 290. 18. For discussion, see Keith R. Bradley, Slavery and Rebellion in the Roman World 140 B.c.-70 B.C. (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989);Dock&, Medieval Slavery, pp. 210-11; Orlando Patterson, The Sociology of Slavery: A n Analysis of the Origins, Development and Structure of Negro Slave Society in Jamaica (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 19671, Chap. 9; Raymond A. Bauer and Alice H. Bauer, “Dayto Day Resistance to Slavery,”Journal ofNegro History 27 (October, 1942): 388-419; Eugene D.Genovese Roll, Jordan, Roll (New York Pantheon i974), Book 4; Eugene D. Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the New World (New York zy 99 zyxw zyxwvutsr The Arc of the Moral Universe First, a variety of forms of resistance could be pursued individually and were not threatening to slavery, including: “Taking”from masters (what slaves called “taking”the masters called “~tealing”~g), lying, feigning illness, slowing down the pace of work, damaging tools and animals, self-mutilation, suicide, infanticide, abortion, arson, murdering the master, and running away. Running away was particularly important as a display of power, both because it showed the costs that slaves could impose on masters (masters lost a considerable capital investment and needed to increase their investment in enforcement), and because running away could be a collective enterprise, sometimes indistinguishable in its effects on the sustainability of slavery from rebellions, as in case of the massive exoduses of slaves (especially plantation slaves) in or in the massive fleeing of soFrench West Africa beginning in 1895,~~ called “contraband”slaves during the American civil war, or in the flight of more than 20,000 slaves from Deceleia in the final decade of the Peloponnesian War. A second form of resistance-less frequent, but also more collective and threatening-was the widespread phenomenon of “maroon” communities.21Established by runaway slaves, some maroon communities zy zyxw zyxw zyxwv Vintage, 1979); Mary Karasch, Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro 1808-1850 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), Chap. 10; Barbara Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society 16.501838 (Kingston: Heineman Publishers, iggo), Chap. 5; Isaac Mendelsohn, Slavery in the Ancient Near East (New York Oxford University Press, igdg), pp. 66, 121; Ruth Mazo Karra, Slavery and Society in Medieval Scandinavia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1g88), pp. 123-27; Frederick Cooper, Plantation Slavey on the East Coast of Africa (New Haven: Yale University Press, 19771, pp. 200-210; Richard Roberts and Martin A. Klein, “The Banamba Slave Exodus of 1905 and the Decline of Slavery in the Western Sudan,”Journal ofAfrican History 21 (1980): 375-94; Paul Lovejoy, Transformationsin Slavery:A History of Slavery in Africa (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1983), Chap. 11; Paul Lovejoy, ed., Africans in Bondage: Studies in Slavery and the Slave Trade (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986); Suzanne Miers and Richard Roberts, eds., The End of Slavery in Africa (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 19881, Chaps. 3, 6, 9, 13. For some skeptical remarks, see Finlep Ancient Slavery, pp. 111-16. 19. On stealing and resistance, see Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, pp. 599-612. 20. See Roberts and Klein, “Banamba Slave Exodus,” Lovejoy, Transformations, pp. 266ff. For doubts about the extent of desertions in the period of African abolition, see Richard Roberts and Suzanne Miers, “The End of Slavery in Africa,”in Miers and Roberts, eds., End of Slavery in Africa, pp. 27-33. 21. On maroon activity, see Patterson, Sociology of Slavery3pp. 266-73; Cooper, Plantation Slavery, pp. 200-210; Allan G. B. Fisher and Humphrey J. Fisher, Slavery and Muslim Society in Africa The Institution in Saharan and Sudunic Africa and the Trans-SaharanTrade (London: C. Hurt and Co., 19711, p. 94; and Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution, Chap. 2. zyxwvut 100 zyxwvut Philosophy G Public Affairs were quite small-the Hanglip community near Cape Town; the watoro communities on the Swahili coast; the various Western African cases of maroon activity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; and the many maroon colonies in the southern United States (particularly in the eighteenth century), some based on Indian-black alliances. Others were large-scale and long-standing-including the Jamaican communities established in the 1650s, consolidated through the first Maroon War of 1725-40, and recognized by a treaty with the British in 1738; and several of the Brazilian quilombos, in particular the quilombo of Palmares-an African state in Pernambuco and Alagoas, which lasted for nearly a century (from c. 1605-g5), included (on some estimates) as many as 20,00030,000slaves, and fought off some eighteen Dutch and Portuguese expeditions over a period of more than fifty years. Finally, most dramatically, there are slave revolts: three major rebellions in Italy and Sicily between 140 and 70 B.c., the first of which involved some 200,000 rebels, and the last (led by Spartacus in 73-71 B.c.) involving as many as 150,000 rebels; the fourteen-year war of the Zanj against the Abassid Empire in the mid-ninth century; the one significant slave rebellion per decade in the Guineas in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (one of which involved some 10,000-20,000 slaves); and the revolution in Saint Dominique stimulated by the French Revolution.22 These examples underscore the limits of the extension-of-will and ownership conceptions of slavery: To appreciate the power of slaves we must distinguish real from legal disabilities, and from the public interpretation of those disabilities. Slaves of course suffered from legal disabilities, which both codified and contributed to their lack of power. But their general lack of legally codified or publicly acknowledged rights also zy zyx zyxwvut 22. For discussions of these and other slave rebellions see C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussainl L‘Overture and the Sun Doming0 Revolution (New York Random House, 1963); Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, pp. 587-98, Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution; John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South, 2nd ed. (New York Oxford University Press, ig7g), pp. 125-31; David Brion Davis, Slavery and Human Progress (Oxford: Oxford University Press, i984), pp. 5-8; Moses Finley, The Ancient Economy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 19731, pp. 89,gz; I? A. Brunt, Social Conflicts in the Roman Republic (New York Norton, igp), pp. 114-15; Dock&, Medieval Slavery, Chap. 4; Patterson, Sociology of Slavery, pp. 266-73; Bradley, Slavery and Rebellion. For references o n and discussion of African cases, see Cooper, Plantation Slavery, pp. 202-3; Frederick Cooper, “ReviewArticle: The Problem of Slavery in African Studies,” Journal ofAfrican History 20, no. i (1979):103-25; Roberts and Klein, “Banamba Slave Exodus”; Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavey. 101 zyxwvutsrq zyxw The Arc of the Moral Universe zyxwvu exaggerated their real situation. Thus slaves were commonly able to do what the law denied them the right to do. For example, slave “marriages”were not recognized at law, but more or less stable unions were part of the practice of virtually all slave socieAnd tie~.~ 3 while slaves had no legal right to control the pace of their work, they had, as a general matter, some power-highly qualified, limited, and always dangerous to exercise-to help to shape it through various forms of resistance and threats of resistance. While, then, the actual terms of association among slaves themselves and between slaves and masters reflected the need to find a stable accommodation between agents with vastly different powers, the legal and moral representation of those relations denied that need, emphasizing instead the unilateral dictation of terms and conditions by masters, and the absence of a capacity for independent action on the part of slaves. Force and Consent Premising this conception of slavery as distinctive form of power, we come now to the question: How was this form reproduced? First, through force. Force plays a central role in the initial enslavement of individuals and groups. Voluntary enslavement is quite rare in the history of slavery. War and kidnapping, in contrast, are among the most familiar means for initially enslaving nonslave populations, though most slaves were born into it.24 Furthermore, masters themselves, or their agents (drivers, overseers, etc.), commonly deployed force-in particular, the force of the lash25-directly against slaves. Throughout antiquity, slaves alone were subject to corporal punishment, and were permitted to give evidence only under torture.26Greek and Roman slave owners had the right to punish and torture their own zy zyx 23. See Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, p. 186: “In97 percent of the societies falling in the sample of world cultures, masters recognized the unions of slaves. In not a single case, however, did such recognition imply custodial powers over children.”On the U.S. case, see Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, pp. 433-535; Herbert Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925 (New York Vintage, 1977). 24. See Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, Chaps. 4, 5 for discussion of the frequency of different forms of enslavement. 25. Thus Patterson claims that “thereis no known slaveholding society where the whip was not considered an indispensable instrument.” Slavery and Social Death, p. 4. For some vivid details, see Bradley, Slavery and Society, pp. 165-73, and Karasch, Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro, pp. iu-25. 26. Finley, Ancient Slavery, pp. 93-94; Thomas Wiedemann, Greek and Roman Slavery (Baltimore:JohnsHopkins University Press, 1981), pp. 74, 166-69. zy 102 zyxw zyx zyx zyxwvutsr Philosophy & Public Affairs slaves for offenses committed against the master and on his property27 And Orlando Patterson estimates that in 75 percent of slave societies, masters received either negligible or mild punishment for killing slaves.28 But the use of force against slaves was not simply a common feature of slavery, According to a seventeenth-century Brazilian saying, “Whoever wants to profit from his Blacks must maintain them, make them work well, and beat them even better; without this there will be no service or gain.”29Force, that is, was an essential feature whose role can be explained in terms of the basic properties of slavery. To see how, let us distinguish symbolic, distributive, and productive uses of force. Force is used symbolically when masters use it to exemplify or express the public understanding of slaves as fully subordinate to them, on analogy with the practice of giving slaves new names, or requiring them to wear special forms of clothing. I will put this symbolic use to the side here, principally because we are not able to understand the central role of violence in slave systems, or the patterns in the use of violence against slaves, in terms of its role as a symbol of domination and emblem of servitude. Force is used distributively when it is deployed to ensure a favorable distribution of the benefits of social order-to ensure, that is, a greater share of the benefits than one would be able to secure through bargaining on equal terms. The importance of the distributive use of force can be underscored by noting that slavery commonly emerges under condiWith labor relatively scarce, owners of land and tions of labor s~arcity.3~ other nonhuman resources would face a relatively unfavorable bargaining position, if they had to bargain. As a Dr. Collins, a planter in the West Indies, wrote in an 1811 treatise, “the sugar colonies, in their present state ofslender population [emphasis added], can only be wrought by slaves, or by persons so much at our command, as to be obliged to labor whether they will or not.” Drawing the natural consequence about the use of force as a way to ensure that slaves fulfill their obligations, he says z zyxw zyxw Torture (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), pp. 18ff. Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, p. 193. 29. Cited in Stuart B. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550-1835 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 19851, p. 133. 30. For discussion of this “Nieboer-Domar hypothesis,” see Evsey D. Domar, “The Causes of Slavery or Serfdom: A Hypothesis,” journal of Economic History 30, no. I (March 27. Edward Peters, 28. 1970):18-32. 103 zyxw zyxwvuts The Arc of the Moral Universe that, “Where slavery is established, and the proportion of slaves outnumbers their masters ten to one, terror must operate to keep them in subjection, and terror can only be produced by occasional examples of severity.’9 But the distributive use, too, does not explain the patterns in the use of force in different slave systems, in particular the especially high levels of force used against slaves involved in plantation agriculture and mining. This pattern suggests that force did not serve simply to symbolize or preserve inequalities of power, but also was deployed as a means of eliciting effort. I refer to this as “the productive use of force.” Force is used productively, then, when it is employed to provide incentives to increase the level of output (for example, by increasing labor intensity), rather than simply to ensure a favorable distribution of a fixed output. The productive use has a familiar economic rationale. Limited in their power, slaves drew limited benefits from social cooperation, and, since they did not have to sell their labor to gain their subsistence, such benefits as they did get were importantly independent from their activity. So masters faced problems in motivating slaves to work. Force was one solution (we will come to the others). As Adam Smith put it, “A person who can acquire no property, can have no other interest but to eat as much, and to labor as little as possible. Whatever work he does beyond what is sufficient to purchase his own maintenance, can be squeezed out of him by violence only, and not by any interest of his 0 w n . ” 3 ~ Smith’s contention about “violence only” is overstated, in ways that will become clear when I discuss the use of positive incentives. But it does capture an important problem for masters, and provides a good characterization of the basis of the productive use of force. Appreciating the scope and limits of the productive use of force requires attention to the costs (to masters) of using force as distinct from other incentives.33 It might require a staff of overseers, or some other diversion of resources from more productive uses, and might damage the human beings one is seeking to “motivate.”Those costs would be z zyxwvutsrq zyx 31. Dr. Collins, Practical Rules for the Managment and Medical Treatment of Negro Slaves in the Sugar Colonies (London: J. Barfield, 1 8 ~ 1pp. , 33, 36. 32. Smith, Wealth of Nations, p. 365. 33. The discussion that follows draws on Stefan0 Fenoaltea, “Slavery and Supervision in Comparative Perspective:A Model,”Journal ofEconornic History 4, no. 3 (September 1984): 635-68. 104 zyx zy zyxwvutsrq Philosophy C Public Affairs worth incurring, however, if they were low relative to the benefits generated by the use of force. Two conditions help to produce such a violence-generating cost-benefit structure. First, the costs of enforcement depend in part on the nature of the activities being enforced. And the costs of using force are likely to be relatively low when-as in important areas of agriculture and mining-performance is easy to monitor (the tasks are straightforward, can be performed in groups or gangs, and performance is easily measurable), and the work sufficiently distasteful that considerable material incentives would be required to motivate its performance. The benefit side depends on the responsiveness of slaves to force as against compensation. Thus force will be encouraged if slaves have a “target” income beyond which they are relatively unresponsive to further material incentives, and if the tasks they are expected to perform require intensive effort, rather than high levels of skill and attention. The reason for this is that intensive effort can plausibly be motivated by threats of pain rather than promises of reward. This cost-benefit structure is characteristic of work in agriculture and mining. And, as I indicated, we do see force playing an especially central role in slavery when slaves are integrated into the economy, more particularly when they work in mines and on plantations (more so with cotton than tobacco), and, in the case of sugar, more in planting and harvesting cane than in milling it.34 Under such circumstances, as Dr. Collins put it, “a system of remuneration alone is inadequate, for the reward must ever be incommensurate to the service, where labour is misery, and rest, happiness.”35 In contrast, we find other means of eliciting effort from slaves who were more skilled, or located in urban settings. The maintenance of slavery could not, then, proceed through force al0ne.3~Masters wanted to elicit greater effort, slaves typically faced impossible odds if they sought their own emancipation, and the result was zyxwv zyxwvuts 34. Writing about Bahian sugar plantations, for example, Schwartz claims that none of the “commentators on the engenho operations speaks of drivers or the whip being used inside the fabrica.” See Sugar Plantations, p. 154, and the subsequent discussion of the need for incentives, pp. 155-59. 35. Collins, Practical Rules, p. 170. 36. For a valuable summary of the evolving literature on this issue in the case of American slavery, see Robert W. Fogel, Without Consent or Conlract: The Rise and Fall of American Slauery (New York Norton, ig8g), Chap. 6 . 105 zyxw zyxw zy zyxwvutsr The Arc of the Moral Universe superficiallymore consensual forms of servitude.Abstracting from endless varieties of compromise and accommodation, varying across time and place, we can distinguish two broad ways to make servitude (superficially) more voluntary: First, masters deployed positive incentives-what Dock& has called the “paraphernalia of ‘voluntary’ servitude”37-including material reward, authority, autonomy, family security, and manumission. The importance of the strategic use of incentives is a common theme in ancient and modern treatises on slave management. Genovese quotes an overseer making the strategic case for permitting slaves to pursue private cultivation: “Every means are used to encourage them, and impress on their minds the advantage of holding property, and the disgrace attached to idleness. Surely, if industrious for themselves, they will be so for their masters, and no Negro, with a wellstocked poultry house, a small crop advancing, a canoe partly finished, or a few tubs unsold, all of which he calculates soon to enjoy, will ever run away. In ten years I have lost by absconding, forty-seven days, out of nearly six hundred Negroes.”3*Similarly, a Brazilian advice book instructs planters in Rio de Janeiro that: “Their gardens and what they produce in them cause them to acquire a certain love of country, distract them a bit from slavery, and delude them into believing they have a small right to property.. . . Extreme discomfort dries up their hearts, hardens them, and inclines them to evi1.”39 Autonomy, in the form of time free from labor, for example, was distributed with similar aims. A West Indian planter summarized this strategy: zy z [Tlhe best way of rewarding them . . . is to assign them a task, regulated by [a] given quantity, and to require as much from them every day, leaving them to effect it at what hours they please, and let them enjoy to their own use, whatever time they do it in less. This will encourage every negro to make his utmost exertion, in consequence of zy 37. Dockes, Medieval Slavery, p. 208. 38. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, p. 539. On private cultivation as an incentive in other settings, see Rebecca Scott, Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labor, 1860-1899 (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1986),p. 15; JohnEdwin Mason, “Fortunate Slaves and Artful Masters: Labor Relations in the Rural Cape Colony During the Era of Emancipation, ca. 1825-1838,” in Slavery in South Africa: Captive Labor on the Dutch Frontier, ed. Elizabeth A. Eldredge and Fred Morton (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994), pp. 67-91. 39. Cited in Robert Conrad, Children of God’s Fire: A Documentary History of Black Slavery in Brazil (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 78. 106 zyxw zyxwvuts Philosophy & Public Affairs which, the work of twelve hours will be dispatched in ten, and with much more satisfaction to themselves. . . .4O According to Frederick Douglass, holidays were among the “most effective means in the hands of the slaveholder in keeping down the spirit of insurrection. . . . The holidays serve as conductors or safety valves, to carry off the rebellious spirit of enslaved humanity.” Emphasizing the role of holidays as an incentive, he says that they are “part and parcel of the gross fraud, wrong, and inhumanity of slavery. They are professedly a custom established by the benevolence of the slaveholders; but I undertake to say that, it is the result of selfishness. . . . They do not give the slaves this time because they would not like to have their work during its continuance, but because they know it would be unsafe to deprive them of it.”4l A majority of slave systems relied as well on practices of manumission through which slaves were individually emancipated by their masters, though rates of manumission varied greatly across different slave syst e m ~ . 4The ~ practice might take the form of self-purchase, with the slave using his or her peculium to pay for freedom (the Cuban coartacion and Islamic murgu both involved gradual self-purchase). Other standard processes included the freeing of concubines, the emancipation of the children of concubines, and the manumission of slaves as displays of piety in Islamic societies. A central motivating idea behind the practice of manumission is stated clearly in a Peripatetic treatise on economics: “It is essential that each slave should have a clearly defined goal (telos). It is both just and advantageous to offer freedom as a prize-when the prize and the period of time in which it can be attained, are clearly defined, this will make them work willingly.”43Aristotle, too, notes in the Politics that “it is expedient that liberty should always be held out to [slaves] as the reward of their services.”44 zyxwvu zy zyxwvu 40. Collins, Practical Rules, p. 152. 41. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, in Henry Louis Gates, ed., The Classic Slave Narratives (New York Signet, ig87), p. 300. 42. See Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, Chaps. 8-10; Keith Hopkins, Conquerors and Slaves (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ig78), pp. 117-18, 126, 128, 131, 147; Cooper, Plantation Slavery, pp. 242-52; Frederick Cooper, “Islam and Cultural Hegemony,” in Paul Lovejoy, ed., The Ideology of Slavery in Africa (Beverley Hills: Sage, 1981), pp. 287-88. 43. Oeconomica, trans. Benjamin Jowett, in The Works of Aristotle, ed. W. D. Ross, Vol. 10 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, igzi), i344bi2-22. 44. Politics, i33oa33ff. 107 zyxw zyxwvutsr The Arc of the Moral Universe In light of Aristotle’s official views about slavery, the proposed rationale for this strategy is puzzling. According to Book One of his Politics, some human beings are naturally slaves-those that lack the capacity for deliberation, and so are appropriately subordinated to those possessed of adequate deliberative powers. More particularly, natural masters have the capacity to foresee by the exercise of mind, whereas natural slaves have only the power to implement such foresight with their bodies. But to say that slaves will work willingly when they have a goal and can see the connections between present actions and the achievement of that goal, suggests that slaves have greater deliberative powers and powers of foresight than this justification permits. Here we see a characteristic tension between the public justifications for slavery and features of the practice of slavery, tensions I will emphasize in my later discussion of slave interests and the injustice of slavery. Alongside force and positive incentives, cultural representations of slavery as reasonable-religious and ethical representations justifying slavery-also figure in explaining compliance. Rousseau’s Social Contract emphasizes what has come to be a commonplace of modern social theory: that the “strongest is never strong enough to be master all the time, unless he transforms force into right and obedience into duty.”45 The thought is that existing power is made more powerful by public ideas that represent it as a necessity, make a virtue of such necessity, and thereby suggest that the terms of order are an object of common consent and that subjects willingly comply It seems indisputable that slavery was sustained in part by the acceptance on the part of slaves of religious and ethical views that presented their status as suitable for them, and by the more willing compliance resulting from such acceptance: though vast inequalities of power typically excluded determined resistance, the phenomenology of compliance appears not to have been exhausted by strategic accommodation to those inequalities. But three qualifications are equally important. First, slaves typically did not simply embrace the dominant religious and ethical interpretations of their nature and their condition. More commonly, they either developed syncretic religious views, combining zy zy 45. Jean-JacquesRousseau, Social Contract, ed. Roger D. Masters, trans. JudithR. Masters [New York St. Martin’s Press, ig78), p. 48. The literature on the subject is vast. For an especially illuminating discussion, see JamesC. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, iggo), esp. Chaps. 3, 4. 108 zyxw zyx zyx zyxwvuts Philosophy & Public Affairs religious conceptions and practices formed prior to enslavement with distinctive interpretations of the dominant religious tradition-as in the case of Afro-Baptist conceptions of the SOU^,^^ or in the reported case of a religious confraternity in Salvador, Brazil, called “Confraternity of our Lady of the Good Death”47-or pursued dual systems of religious belief and practice, as with the simultaneous embrace by Brazilian slaves of Bantu and Yoruban cults as well as Christianity. Syncretism and dualism provided frameworks for incorporating themes favorable to the interests of slaves into slave religions.@ American Afro-Baptism, for example, rejected doctrines of original sin and predestination, and emphasized Old Testament themes of earthly deliverance, comparing the situation and prospects of slaves with the deliverance of the Jews from bondage in Egypt.49 Thus, the Freedman’s Hymn: “Shout the glad tidings o’er Egypt’s Dark Sea; Jehovah has triumphed, his people are free.” Similarly, the religious views characteristic of East African coastal slaves blended hinterland beliefs and practices with a distinctive form of Islam, which rejected the dominant conception of sharp divisions within God’s creation in favor of an emphasis on the importance of love for the Prophet and the possibility of attaining religious purity through that l0ve.50 Second, even when slave understandings served as a basis for an accommodation to slavery, the fact that they were not fully accommodations turned them into potential sources of “internal normative criticism’’ and resistance. By “internal normative criticism” (sometimes called “restorationist” or “traditionalist” criticism) I mean the criticism of practices by appeal to understandings, norms, and values that are, at some level of generality, widely shared. So, for example, we find cases in which slaves appear to embrace the language and moral ideals of a dominant paternalistic conception of the zyxwvu zyxw 46. Mechal Sobel, Trabelin’ On: The Slave Journey to a n Afro-Baptist Faith (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988),p. i05. 47. Katia M. de Queiros Mattoso, To Be a Slave in Brazil: 155ei888,trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1986). 48. An alternative view of Cariocan slave religion-as essentially continuing flexible Central African traditions, rather than as syncretic or dualistic-is Karasch, Slave Life, Chap. 9. 49. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, pp. 232-55; for qualifications, see Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, pp. 73-76. On the importance of deliverance in slave spirituals, see Blassingame, Slave Community, pp. 141-45. 50. Cooper, Plantation Slavery, pp. 236-42, and “Islam and Cultural Hegemony,” pp. 291-93. 109 zyxwvuts The Arc of the Moral Universe zyxw zy relations between masters and slaves, thus describing and evaluating their own position on the model of relations between parents and children.5’ The practical correlates of this paternalism-what gave it experiential resonancewere the various positive incentives that I just discussed. But while masters would characterize their paternalist “obligations” to provide such incentives and the various actions undertaken in fulfillmentof those obligations as expressions of their own benevolence, and the benefits they conferred on slaves as grants of privilege revocable at will, slaves appear to have interpreted them in terms of masters’ obligations and/or slaves’ rights. Such slave interpretations served in turn as bases for resisting unilateral shifts in the traditional terms of relation between masters and slaves-for example, in Confederate states during the Civil War,or in areas of French West Africa, Coastal Guinea, and the East African coast that experienced large-scale slave exoduses in the late nineteenth and early twentieth ~enturies.5~ While masters might have taken such shifts to be legitimate revocations of privilege, the slaves took them to be infringements of obligations and violations of entitlements. Similarly, we find slave resistance in the mid- and late-nineteenth century in the Sokoto Caliphate in the western Sudan organized around millennial interpretations of dominant Islamic ideals, ideals that had served earlier in the century to mobilize slaves to join in the jihadthat had established the caliphate.53 Finally, no sharp and useful distinction can be drawn between the use of internal norms to criticize practices and more radical forms of criticism that reject those norms in favor of other norms. And the views of some slaves-how many we will never know-seem most plausibly characterized as continuing internal normative criticism to the point where it passes into external criticism. zyxwvuts zyxwvut 51. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll. 52. See Leon E Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York Vintage, ig79), pp. 5-6; Martin A Klein, “Slave Resistance and Slave Emancipation in Coastal Guinea,”in Miers and Roberts, eds., The End of Slavery in Afica, pp. 203-19. 53. For detailed discussion of this important range of issues and cases, see Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll; Cooper, “Islam and Cultural Hegemony”;Richard Roberts, “Ideology, Slavery, and Social Formation: The Evolution of Maraka Slavery in the Middle Niger Valley,” in Lovejoy, Ideology of Slavery; Dock&, Medieval Slavery, pp. 212-15; Lovejoy, “Problems of Slave Control in the Sokoto Caliphate,’’in Paul Lovejoy, ed., Africans in Bondage: Studies in Slavery and the Slave Trade (Madison:University of Wisconsin Press, 1986),pp. 262-64. 110 zyxw zyx zyx zyxwvutsrqp Philosophy G Public Affairs zyxwv Consider a few examples. Frederick Douglass tells the story of bringing his weekly wages of six dollars to his master, and sometimes being given six cents to “encourage” him. But, Douglass says, this “had the opposite effect. I regarded it as a sort of admission of my right to the whole. The fact that he gave me any part of my wages was proof, to my mind, that he believed me entitled to the whole of them.”54 Or consider what is sometimes referred to as the “antinomianism” of American slaves, reflected for example in the willingness of slaves to endorse theft from masters-they referred to such “theft” as “taking” not “stealing”while acknowledging the wrong of theft from other slaves.55 Commenting on this willingness, Thomas Jefferson observes: That disposition to theft, with which [slaves]have been branded, must be ascribed to their situation, and not to any depravity of the moral sense. The man in whose favor no laws of property exist, probably feels himself less bound to respect those made in favor of others. When arguing for ourselves, we lay it down as fundamental, that laws, to be just, must give reciprocation of right; that without this, they are mere arbitrary rules, founded in force, and not in conscience, and it is a problem which I give the master to solve, whether the religious precepts against the violation of property were not framed for him as well as his slave? and whether the slave may not justifiably take a little from one who has taken all from him, as he may slay one who would slay himW Similarly, there is a song that slaves in Brazil are reported to have sung: The white man says: the black man steals The black man steals for good reason. Mister white man also steals When he makes us slave.57 zyxwvu zyxwvu 54. Douglass, Narrative, p. 317. 55. Blassingame, Slave Testimuny, p. 374. For a detailed discussion of theft and its implications for the moral rejection of slavery and the development of a “counter-morality,’’see Alex Lichtenstein, ‘That Disposition to Theft, With Which They Have Been Branded: Moral Economy, Slave Management, and the Law,” Journal of Social History 21 (1988): I‘ 413-40. 56. Quoted in Alex Lichtenstcin, “’That Disposition to Theft,” p. 413. 57. Mattoso, To Be a Slave, p. 137. 111 zyxwvutsrqp zyxw The Arc of the Moral Universe Are these cases in which slaves embrace such plausibly widespread internal norms as that people may legitimately take back what has been stolen from them, or steal in cases of extreme need, or own what they make? Or does the application of these norms to themselves show that slaves are advancing a divergent interpretation of widely accepted norms? What seems most plausible is that the very idea that these norms apply to slaves as well as nonslaves, and the attendant suggestion of the moral equality of masters and slaves, is such a departure from dominant understandings-such a distinctive interpretation of the moral community covered by the norms-that we have now passed from internal to external criticism. At the same time, this expansion of the moral community and the associated passage from internal to external criticism is arguably anticipated when the internal norms are presented to slaves as considerations they should recognize as binding, and by appeals to reciprocity in justifications of ~lavery.5~ In any case, it seems clear that no crisp line can be drawn between different forms of normative criticism, and that the pursuit of one may often lead to the pursuit of the other. Whereas the claim that moral acceptance leads to compliance has some force, then, that force is limited. Its limits are not to be found (at least not exclusively) in the rejection by slaves of moral ideas, or their failure to take moral notions seriously. To the contrary, they are marked by the fact that regnant norms and alternative interpretations of those norms can themselves serve as bases for moral criticism of social arrangements, and by the fact that internal criticism can pass over into more radical forms of moral criticism that appeal to a distinctive set of moral ideals. But if we are to understand better the critical use of norms, the development of alternative interpretations of norms, the uses slaves made of their power, and the importance and prevalence of positive incentives, we need an account of the interests of slaves. zyxw Interests Slaves had interests in material well-being, autonomy, and dignity. Perhaps that goes without saying. But the enterprise of attributing interests to people seems to some arbitrary, and attributions of these interests to 58. See the suggestive remarks on unanimity, in Scott, Domination, pp. 55-58; on the importance of reciprocity in shaping public justifications of power, see Barrington Moore, Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt (White Plains: M. E. Sharpe, 1987). 112 zyxw zyx zyxwvutsrqp Philosophy 6 Public Affairs slaves may strike others as anachronistic, romantic, ideologically blinded, or simply ignorant. These interests, however, play two roles in my argument: the case for both the injustice of slavery and its limited viability turns on the claim that slavery conflicts with the legitimate interests of slaves in material well-being, autonomy, and dignity. So I need to say enough about them to explain why that later appeal to them is plausible. As a general matter, then, a course of action or state of affairs is in a person’s interests just in case that course or state is the best way to realize an end that he or she would affirm on reflection-considering his or her life as a whole, conflicts between and among current aims, the strength of various desires, and the conditions that may have engendered current ends-given full information and full imaginative powers.59 In practice, however, we base attributions of interests on a person’s actual ends (abjuring the hypothetical aims that figure in the definition) because we in effect assume that reflection would not produce changes in the relevant ends. The burden of proof falls on challengers to attributions based on actual ends; they must provide a reason for thinking that those ends would shift on reflection. Applying these general observations to my comments here, I will sketch some evidence that slaves cared substantially about material well-being, autonomy, and dignity, leaving it to those who doubt the attributions of interests to show that reflection would have dissolved these concerns. First, then, the phenomena of resistance and revolt support the view that at least some slaves cared greatly about autonomy-enough to accept significant risks, e.g., the risks taken by the 6,000 crucified slaves who lined the road from Capua to Rome after the defeat of the rebellion led by Spartacus (100,ooo slaves were killed in this revolt).60This willingness to accept risks for autonomy is clearest in the case of individual runaways, maroons, and rebels. Furthermore, this aspiration to autonomy appears to be quite gen- zyx zyx zyxwvu 59. The account of interests draws o n the discussion of deliberative rationality in John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), Sec. 64; Albert 0. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977);Railton, “Moral Realism”; Raymond Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 19811,Chap. 2 ; and William Connolly, The Terms of political Discourse, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ig83), Chap. 2. 60. Finley, Ancient Slauery, p. 98; Wiedemann, Greek and Roman Slauery, p. 222, citing a passage from Appian’s Roman Civil Wars,Bradley, Slauery and Rebellion. 113 zyxw zy zyxwvutsrqp The Arc of the Moral Universe eral. Referring to the phenomenon of mass departures by slaves in, for example, Northern Nigeria, Guinea, and the French Sudan between 1895 and 1910,Lovejoy claims that this “exoduswas so large that it represents one of the most significant slave revolts in history.”el But even the less determined forms of resistance indicate a desire for greater control by slaves over the circumstances of their lives. Second, the provision of material incentives and manumission, and the various other paraphernalia of voluntary servitude, indicate that slaves wanted material improvement and autonomy, and that masters, aware of those wants, sought to elicit more cooperative behavior by promising to reward such behavior by satisfymg those wants. Earlier I mentioned the passages in the Peripatetic treatise addressing manumission. We find closely parallel argument in the Roman agricultural treatises of Cato, Varro, and Columella, the last of which mentions the importance of “decent living conditions, of time off from work, the fostering of family life among slaves,’’and above all the prospect of manumission in encouraging cooperative behavior.62 Third, evidence for the desire for autonomy is provided by American slave narratives, and the interviews conducted by both the Freedman’s Inquiry Commission and the WPA. They provide substantial testimony on the aspiration to autonomy; indeed the slave narratives are organized around that aspiration. And they commonly return to the theme suggested by the phenomenon of manumission: that the desire for autonomy is not simply in service of material improvement. Mary Prince, for example, writes that: “All slaves want to be free-to be free is very sweet. I have been a slave myself-and I know what slaves feel-I can tell by myself what other slaves feel, and by what they have told me. The man that says slaves be quite happy in slavery-that they zyxw 61. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery, p. 267. He adds that “some scholars have argued that African servility depended on attitudes quite unrelated to the concept of ‘freedom.’ African thought, they claim, did not consider freedom a desirable or possible status. There can be no mistake about this matter. The massive desertions by slaves throughout the nineteenth century and especially at the end of the century when European conquest was well underway, demonstrates that the views of these scholars are incorrect.” For an alternative view, see Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Context of African Abolition,” in Miers and Roberts, eds., The End of Slauery in Africa, pp. 485-503, especially the illuminating remarks about demarginalization.social dependence, and social belonging, at pp. 494-502. 62. Keith R. Bradley, Slaves and Masters in the Roman Empire:A Study in Social Control (New York Oxford University Press, 1987),p. 25. zyxw 114 zyxw zyx zyx zyxwvutsr Philosophy G Public Affairs zyxwvu zyxw don’t want to be free-that man is either ignorant or a lying pers0n.”~3 Writing some 1800 years earlier, the ex-slave Phaedrus suggested that the classical Roman fable of the dog, who is well-fed and has a place to live but who is kept in chains during the day, and the wolf, who is hungry and homeless but free, expresses the slaves’ sense of how sweet liberty i s 6 4 Returning to the narratives, my claim that they are organized around the aspiration to freedom is best captured by a passage near the end of Linda Brent’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, where she says: “Reader, my story ends with freedom; not in the usual way, with marriage. I and my children are now free! We are as free from the power of slaveholders as arc the white people of the north; and though that, according to my ideas, is not saying a great deal, it is a vast improvement in my condition.”@ Fourth, the central role of force in establishing and sustaining slave systems also argues for the presence of interests in material well-being and autonomy. The fact that slave “recruitment”typically involved force indicates that slavery was rarely chosen by slaves-and then only under difficult circumstances-and that observing the conditions of others who had been enslaved did not encourage self-enslavement.66Further, the fact that force and threats of force were regular features of the lives of slaves indicates that masters thought that slaves themselves would not consent to the continuation of slavery, given an alternative. Finally, this claim about interests receives support from the combination of ambiguous acceptance and rejection of the regnant justifications of slavery. The fact that slaves did not fully internalize regnant justifications for slavery, together with the fact that an acceptance of the justifications would have put them at a disadvantage in pursuing material well-being and autonomy, provides indirect support for the claim that they had these fundamental interests. Since full acceptance might have disarmed slaves even when the balance of forces turned in their favor, they were led away from it. Lacking the resources to forge wholly inde63. Mary Prince, History of M a y Prince, A West Indian Slave, in Gates, Classic Slave Narrutives, p. 214. 64. For discussion of the fables, see Bradley, Slaves and Masters, pp. 150-53. 65. Linda Brent, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, ed. L. Marian Child, in Gates, ed., Classic Slave Narratives, p. 513. Or see Lucy A. Delaney, From the Darkness Cometh the Light or Struggles for Freedom, in Six Womenk Slave Narratives (New York Oxford University Press, 1g88), p. 58. 66. On self-enslavement, see Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, pp. 130-31. zyxw zy The Arc of the Moral Universe pendent and distinctive ideals, they developed variants of the dominant views with an affinity to their interests, or embraced alternatives to those dominant ideas. The interests of slaves are, in short, reflected in the content and interpretation of the dominant norms and ideals themselves. Coming now to dignity: the central feature of dignity for our purposes is its social aspect-that it involves a desire for public recognition of one’s worth. Though a person can sustain a sense of self-worth in the face of repeated insults, still, public recognition is related to dignity in two ways: first, persons with a sense of their own worth regard such recognition as an appropriate acknowledgment of that worth; and, second, recognition provides psychological support for that sense, making it easier to sustain. In particular, having a sense of dignity, we want others to recognize that we have aims and aspirations and to acknowledge the worth of those aims and aspirations by, inter alia, providing conditions (opportunities and resources) that enable us to pursue them. Several considerations support the attribution to slaves of an interest in conditions that support and are appropriate to a sense of dignity. First, when we consider the few oral and written records left by slaves, from the fables collected by Phaedrus to American slave narratives, what we find is repeated assertions of their sense of self-worth, and the ways that their conditions violate that sen~e.~7 Second, as I already indicated, the normative understandings of slavery held by slaves press the worth of the slaves into focus. This sense of worth is suggested both by the content of those views-for example, by the slave interpretations of regnant norms-and by the very concern that there be a justification for the slave condition. For example, I mentioned earlier the claim that benefits conferred by masters are matters of right, and not privilege. A particularly striking statement of this is provided by an ex-slave named Benjamin Miller. In a Freedman’s Inquiry Commission interview, Miller says: “I was in bondage in Missouri, too. I can’t say that my treatment was bad. In one respect I say it was not bad, but in another I consider it was as bad as could be. I was a slave. That covers it all. I had not the rights of a man.”68 zy zy zyxwv 67. “There is,”according to Patterson, “absolutely no evidence from the long and dismal annals of slavery to suggest that any group of slaves ever internalized the conception of degradation held by their masters.” Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, p. 97. 68. Blassingame, Slave Testimony,p. 439. 116 zyxw zyx zyxwvutsr Philosophy 6 Public Affairs Third, the desire for dignity is closely linked to a desire for social conditions that support autonomy and decent material circumstances. For such conditions provide support for a sense of dignity, both because maintaining a sense of self-worth without resources is so difficult, and because having a decent level of resources (or at least a substantial opThis connection portunity to secure them) is itself an index of re~pect.~g between material welfare, autonomy, and dignity suggests that the pursuit of welfare and autonomy may in part be animated by a desire for the public affirmation and recognition ingredient in conditions that enable people to secure their autonomy and material welfare. Taking these remarks about the different interests together, I will hereafter use the term “fundamental interests” as shorthand for the three interests I have just discussed. zyxw zyxwvutsr 111. INJUSTICE AND THE LIMITS OF SLAVERY Slavery, I have proposed, is best understood as a particular form of power; that form was reproduced through force, strategic incentives, and moral-religious norms; and slave interests in material improvement, autonomy, and dignity are revealed in the practices that reproduce slavery. With these claims as background, I come to the main argument about the injustice of slavery and its viability, which I will pursue by taking up, in turn, the four theses stated earlier. Slavery and Slave Interests Thesis One: The basic structure of slavery as a system of power stands in sharp conflict with fundamental slave interests in material wellbeing, autonomy, and dignity. Consider, first, the interest in material well-being. The intuitive argument for this aspect oP Thesis One is that being a slave is materially undesirable because slaves are relatively powerless. Limited power means limited capacity to bargain for advantage, which means limited capacity to protect basic material interests in nourishment and health. So it seems plausible that it is materially better not to be a slave, even 69. See Rawls’s discussion of the social bases of self-respect in Theory OfJustice,pp. 179, 440-42. zy 117 zyxwvutsr zy The Arc of the Moral Universe if one is a serf or poor peasant. Given the breadth and depth of the limits that define the condition of slave, one can expect to have more power if one is not a slave and to be able to turn that power to material advantage. Against this intuitive argument, it has been said-most famously in Fogel and Engerman’s Time on the Cro~s7~-thatthe relative powerlessness of slaves can work to their material advantage: Because of the limits on their power, they can be subjected to the productive use of force. If they are, output per worker increases, enabling slaves themselves to live a materially better life than if they were emancipated. The intuitive idea is straightforward.Suppose two modes of production are in operation: peasant farms worked by family labor and plantations worked by slave gangs. Suppose, too, that output per worker is greater on the plantations than the family farms. Greater output per head in the plantation system permits owners to provide a higher standard of living to slaves than is available to the family farmers. But why couldn’t families in the smallholding sector pool their resources to form larger units and reap the benefits of the scale economies? Or if the costs of pooling are too high, why couldn’t the small holders offer their labor to plantation owners for a wage in excess of what they can earn on their own farms?Why is being enslaved essential to reaping the benefits? The answer lies in the fact that increased output per worker on large plantations is not generated by increasing returns to scale, but by high intensity, continuous work imposed by masters in the plantation sector on slaves: Fogel estimates that slaves on medium and large plantations worked 76 percent more intensely per hour than free Southern farmers or slaves on small plantati0ns.7~Because of the nonpecuniary costs of such intense and continuous labor, no one would perform it willingly without substantial compensation. Because slaves were relatively powerless, they could be forced to do it. When they were forced, output per person increased, and slaves themselves ended up consuming more than they would have been able to consume if they were not slaves. As Fogel and Engerman put it, “it was only by applying force that it was possible to get blacks to accept gang labor without having to pay a pre- z zyx zyxwvuts zy 70. Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross, z vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1974). 71. Robert W. Fogel, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall ofAmerican Slavery (New York: Norton, ig8g), pp. 78-79. 118 zyxw zyxw zyx zyxwvuts Philosophy G Public Affairs mium that was in excess of the gains from economies of scale.”7*Why, then, isn’t relative powerlessness in the slave’s material interest? Two considerations suggest doubts about the force of this argument. First, the argument about material well-being assumes that we can assess the material welfare of a group simply by considering its level of compensation. But what about the interest in not performing intense, undesirable labor? And what about the fact that increased consumption may fail to compensate for the greater expenditures of energy required by such labor? To be materially well-off is in part a matter of being wellnourished. But nourishment is not a function simply of food consumption levels.73 The same basket of food can produce widely different levels of nourishment depending of such factors as metabolic rates, body size, sex, activity levels, and access to medical services. But the argument that I have been considering assumes that the level of output per person was increased by imposing conditions of intense labor and pain that presumably decrease the level of nourishment resulting from a fixed quantity of food consumption.74 To argue, under these conditions, that slavery improves material welfare by enabling an increased level of food consumption is, then, a form of fetishism.75 Put otherwise, in the passage I cited earlier, Fogel and Engerman refer to “economies of scale” associated with gang labor. But their argument about the material benefits of powerlessness is, as I have indicated, not really about scale economies, but about the forceable extraction of more intense and continuous lab0r.7~Thus, Fogel estimates that gang-system plantations in the South had a 39 percent advantage in total factor pro- z zyxw 72. Fogel and Engerman, Time on the Cross, Vol. 1, p. 237. 73. For a discussion and exploration of implications, see Amartya Sen, “Well-Being, Agency, and Freedom,” Journal of Philosophy 82, no. 4 (April 1985): 195-200; Partha Dasgupta, An Inquiry Into Well-Being and Destitution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, i993), Chaps. 14, 15. 74. Paul David and Peter Ternin, “Slavery: The Progressive Institution,” in Paul David, e t al., eds., Reckoning Wirk Slavery (New York Oxford University Press, 19761, pp. 178-86; Yoram Barzel, “An Economic Analysis of Slavery,” The Journal of Law and Economics 21, no. 1 (April 1977): 95. 75. I have focused on implications for consumption and nourishment. On health, see Joseph C. Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade 17301830 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 19881, Chaps. 9, 10; Karasch, Slave Life in Rio de Juneiro, Chap. 5; Richard Steckel, “A Dreadful Childhood: The Excess Mortality of American Slaves,” Social Science History 10, no. 4 (Winter 1986): 427-65; Fogel, Without Consent or Contract, Chap. 5. 76. Robert Brenner has emphasized this point in several discussions. 119 zy zyxwvutsr The Arc of the Moral Universe zyxwvu zyxw ductivity over free farms, but that this advantage was due to “the greater intensity of labor per hour” imposed by the gang system.77Acknowledging this, we need to consider whether the added income made available by forced high labor intensity sufficed to compensate for its burdens. Fogel notes some suggestive evidence: while slaves “earned 15 percent more income per clock-time hour.. , their income per equal-efficiency hour was 33 percent less than that of free farmer~.”7~ Second, the argument requires both that slavery generate increased output per head, and that slaves reap some of the gains. But in determining whether slavery is materially beneficial for slaves, we cannot simply include a specified level of compensation in the characterization of the slave condition. I have not included such specification in the characterization of slavery as a form of power. More substantively, because slaves were relatively powerless-not merely subordinate at work, but relatively powerless across the board-they would not have the power to enforce a specified share of the potential gains, or perhaps even bargain for more than a bare minimum. Even, then, if relative powerlessness helps produce potential material gains, such powerlessness makes it unreasonable to expect to benefit in the distribution of those gains. So, the position of slave will, as a general matter, be the most materially disadvantageous social position. The conflict between slavery and the autonomy interests of slaves is more straightforward. Autonomy is a matter of being able to set and pursue one’s aspirations. To be in the relatively powerless position of slave is on the whole to lack just such power, or to have it as a result of conditions that are more fortuitous in the lives of slaves than they are even in the lives of other socially subordinate groups. This is clear not just in the arena of work, but (particularly for women slaves) with respect to sexuality as well.79 The case of dignity seems equally clear. A characteristic feature of slave systems is that both the organization of power and the symbolic understandings of that organization-especially the pervasive symbolism of social deathso-deny that slave interests command public re- zyx 77. Fogel, Without Consent or Contract, p. 78; see also Stefano Fenoaltea, “The Slavery Debate: A Note From the Sidelines,”Explorations in Economic History 18 (1981): 304-8. 78. Fogel, Without Consent or Contract, p. 79. 79. See, for example, Bush, Slave Women, pp. 110-18; Karasch, Slave Lqe, pp. 205-10. 80. Patterson, Slavery and Social Death. 120 zyxw zy zyx zyxwvutsr Philosophy G Public Affairs spect. Thus the organization of power largely deprived slaves of the powers required for advancing their interests; and the symbolic expression of that organization represented slaves as extensions of the wills of their masters or as their property, as having no legitimate social place, and as legitimately denied the powers required for protecting and advancing their interests. In his opinion in Dred Scott, Chief Justice Taney said that when the Constitution was written, blacks had “for more than a century been regarded as beings of an inferior order . . . so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”81Because the interest in dignity carries with it an interest in such respect and recognitionboth as appropriate to and as supportive of the sense of dignity-both the structure of slavery and the forms of public culture that grow up around it are more sharply at odds with the interests of slaves than alternative systems are with the interests of their members. Emphasizing the concern for dignity, its independent standing, and the hostility of slavery to it, an unidentified former slave said: “We knowed freedom was on us, but we didn’t know what was to come with it. We thought we was going to get rich like the white folks. We thought we was going to be richer than the white folks, ’cause we was stronger and knowed how to work, and the whites didn’t, and we didn’t have to work for them any more. But it didn’t turn out that way. We soon found out that freedom could make folks proud, but it didn’t make ’em rich.”82 zyxwvu zyxw Injustice Thesis Two: Slavery is unjust because the relative powerlessness of slaves, reflected in the conflict between slavery and slave interests, implies that it could not be the object of a free, reasonable, and informed agreement. In stating this second thesis, I introduce a particular account of justice, based on an idealized notion of consensus-a free, reasonable, and informed agreement.O3 I will not defend this account of justice here, nor zyxwvu 81. Dred Scott v. Sanford 60 U S . 393. 82. Cited in Gutman, Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, p. 361. 83. I draw, as will be evident, on Rawls, Theory of Justice; T. M. Scanlon, “Contractualism and Utilitarianism,” in Amartya Sen and Bernard Williams, eds., Utilitarianism and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). 121 zyxwvutsr zy The Arc of the Moral Universe does the argument depend on its details. What does matter are the intuitive ideas that the ideal consensus view articulates: that a just arrangement gives due consideration to the interests of all its members, and that we give due consideration when we treat people as equals, taking their good fully into account in our social arrangements. The ideal consensus view articulates this requirement of treating people as equals by asking what arrangements people themselves would agree to, if they looked for arrangements acceptable to all, understood as equals. By a free agreement, then, I mean an agreement reached under conditions in which there are no bargaining advantages. An agreement is reasonable only if it is reached on the basis of interests that can be advanced consistent with the aim of arriving at a free agreement. I will hereafter call such interests “legitimateinterests.” An informed agreement is one in which the parties correctly understand the consequences of the agreement. According to this ideal consensus view of justice, then, slavery is unjust because it could not be the object of a free and reasonable agreement. Why not? What features of slavery preclude it from being the object of such an agreement? Given the relative powerlessness that defines the condition of slavery, the force essential to sustaining it, and the public interpretation of slaves that is encouraged by that distribution of power, it is reasonable for slaves to have very low expectations about the satisfaction of their fundamental interests, lower even than in alternative systems of direct social subordination. Given this low expectation,slaves could only “consent” to their condition if the relations of power between masters and slaves determined the rational course of their conduct. But such power is excluded by the requirement of a free agreement. This rejection is reasonable because the fundamental slave interests that lie at its foundation are legitimate. Advancing them was consistent with acknowledging that everyone has the fundamental interests, and that the structure of the social order ought to accommodate those interests. While a material gain for slaves may well have involved reduced expectations at dominant social positions-I am not assuming that the elimination of slavery must represent a Pareto-improvement over a status quo with slavery-those expectations would still have been considerably greater than the expectations of slaves under slavery. Moreover, a gain in dignity for slaves need imply no loss in dignity for masters. The rejection of slavery would have been reasonable, then, because the elimination of slavery would have improved the conditions of slaves zyx zyxw 122 zy zyxwvutsr Philosophy & Public Affairs zy with respect to their fundamental interests; but that improvement need not have imposed on any group a burden at all comparable to that borne by slaves under s1avery.Q Consider, by contrast, the interest in having slaves-which I suppose at least some masters to have had. This was not a morally legitimate interest, since it could not be advanced as a basis for an agreement consistent with the aim of reaching a free agreement on terms of cooperation. Slavery was in the sharpest conflict with the fundamental interests of slaves. Given that slaves had these interests, masters could only propose slavery if they were not aiming to find mutually acceptable terms of social order, but instead seeking to advance their particular interests. And masters could not reasonably expect slaves to agree to terms that conflict with their interests simply because such an agreement would be advantageous to masters-not as part of a free agreement. This rejection of slavery would have been an informed rejection in that it turns on the general features of slavery that I sketched earlier: that slaves are relatively powerless; because they are relatively powerless their legitimate interests in material well-being and autonomy are at best marginally and insecurely protected; such protection as they in fact receive results either from the whims of masters or from a precarious and shifting balance of power between masters and slaves; and since their interests are typically not recognized as significant either in the organization of power or in the dominant conceptions of slaves and their social standing, slavery is an insult to their dignity. This argument does not turn on identifymg slavery with its most murderous forms or slaves as utterly powerless, nor does it assume that slaves are always and everywhere “worked like animals . . . [and]housed like anirnals,’l8sliving lives of joyless degradation. Relative powerlessness itself suffices. Limited Viability Thesis Three: The conflict between slavery and the interests of slaves is an important source of the limited viability of slavery. zyxwvu zyxwvu Slavery is unjust, then, because it conflicts with certain interests of slaves-interests that are identified as morally legitimate by the ideal 84. I focus here on the injury of slavery to slaves, not on claims about the general benefits of abolition. For an especially eloquent statement of those benefits, see Joaquim Nabuco, Abolitionism: The Brazilian Antislavery Struggle, trans. Robert Conrad (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, iy77), esp. p. 83. 85. James, Black Jucobins, p. 10. 123 zyxw zy zyxwvutsr The Arc of the Moral Universe zyxw zyxw consensus view (and no doubt by other views). Does this injustice-making conflict help to account for the demise of slavery?And where, if at all, does the injustice itself enter in? As a first stc ‘p to answering these questions, I defend the third thesis by sketching G o sources of the limited viability of slavery-two lines of argument that figure as important strands in plausible accounts of abolition. The first source emphasizes the recognition of injustice. The idea is that slavery is undermined in part because it was unjust, because that injustice was recognized, and that recognition motivated opposition. Here the injustice of slavery plays an explanatory role, roughly, by virtue of its being cognized and then serving to motivate moral opposition. Let’s separate the contention that recognition of injustice is relevant to explaining the demise of slavery into three components: some consequential opposition to slavery was motivated by moral conviction; the content of those moral convictions can plausibly be represented by the ideal consensus conception of justice that I have presented here; and those moral convictions are themselves explained in part by the injustice of slavery. Without this third point, it would not be the injustice itself that helps to explain the demise, but only the belief that slavery is wrong. I will consider the first two points here, and return later to the third. First, then, it seems clear that moral opposition motivated at least some eighteenth- and nineteenth-century abolitionist opponents of slavery who fought against the slave trade and for the abolition of slavery, who objected to slavery on grounds of principle, whose interests are not sufficient to explain their opposition-Quakers being only the most familiar case-and whose opposition was important to abolition.86 Fogel, who emphasizes the economic success and viability of American slavery, puts the case especially strongly: “[Slavery’s]death was an act of ‘econocide,’a political execution of an immoral system at its peak of economic success, incited by men ablaze with moral fervor.’I87Moral conviction also provides an explanation of some of the motivations of slaves, particularly those who were animated by external moral criticisms of slavery. 86. On the complex background and implications of moral opposition, see David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (Ithaca:Cornell University Press, 1975); Jean R. Soderlund, Quakers and Slavery:A Divided Spirit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). 87. Fogel, Without Consent or Contract, p. 410. 124 zyxw zyx zyxwvutsrq Philosophy G Public Affairs Concerning the second point: Slaves, I have suggested, were motivated to oppose slavery in part by indignation and outrage, and not only by their interests. But this does not suffice to show that they were motivated by a recognition of the injustice of slavery as I have characterized the notion of injustice here. Sometimes-in the case of internal moral criticism-their indignation could be explained by the fact that masters had violated traditional norms and customary understandings. But as I suggested in my earlier discussion of external criticism, the continuity between internal and external criticism, and the expanded conception of the moral community associated with such criticism, not all slave opposition can be explained in those terms. Among the forms of opposition that cannot be are the views advanced in the course of the Haitian Revolution, in slave petitions in the United States, in Jamaica’s 1831 Christmas rebellion, and in the views that animated the participation of ex-slaves in the fight against the Confederacy. In all these cases, opposition was shaped in part by the notions of due consideration and treating people as equals that provide the intuitive foundation of the ideal consensus conception.88 More generally, the conception of slavery-and not merely their own individual enslavement or the violations by masters of customary expectations-as unjust helps explain the late eighteenth century shift that Genovese has described from restorationist rebellions to revolutionary opposition to slavery.*g Furthermore, this opposition (particularly the revolution in Ste. Dominque) was consequential, and contributed to the end of slavery by, among other things, helping to limit the expansion of slavery and contributing strength to movements to end the slave trade. The case for the first two aspects of the recognition-of-injustice view seems plausible. Still, we have not yet arrived fully at the recognition of injustice; for that we must also vindicate the claim that there is an explanatory connection between the injustice of slavery and moral beliefs about it. I will discuss this issue later on, and respond in particular to the objection that all that matters here are beliefs about injustice, and that talk about “recognition” is misplaced. zyxwv zyxwvut zyxwvu 88. Davis, Problem of Slavery, pp. 137-51, 276; Genovese, Rebellion to Revolution. On the interaction between metropolitan abolitionism and slave resistance, see Seymour Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery: British Mobilization in Comparative Perspective (London: MacMillan, 19861,pp. 100-103. 89. Genovese, Rebellion to Revolution. 125 zyxw zyxw zy zyxwvutsr The Arc of the Moral Universe The second view is what I call the conflicting interests account. This view locates viability problems in slavery directly in the conflict between slavery and the fundamental slave interests, without the mediation of moral beliefs. The contention is that these conflicts are a key source of pressure to move from slave to nonslave systems, because they are a source of conflict within slave systems and of disadvantages that slave systems face when they compete economically and conflict militarily with nonslave systems. To bring out the content of this view, I want to note that it helps to explain the force and limits of classical economic arguments about the limits of slavery. Those arguments emphasize the costliness of slave labor, deriving from high enforcement costs, constrained productivity, and difficulties of securing a biologically reproductive slave populati0n.9~Adam Smith, for example, thought that slave labor was the most costly, and was imposed because of false pride and a desire to dominate, not for sound economic reas0ns.9~The conflicting interests view argues that these liabilities of slavery result principally from difficulties in inducing the willing cooperation of slaves, and that those problems of motivation in turn reflect the underlying conflict of interests. If that explanation is right then we should expect problems deriving from the corlflicting interests to have noneconomic manifestations as well-for example, relative military weakness, overt slave resistance, and a loss of political confidence by owners. Consider the military issue. Wars present two problems for slave systems. First, in a wide range of systems, slaves were either not trusted to fight, or otherwise excluded from fighting. With a segment of the population thus excluded, military potential is diminished. For example, the constraints slavery imposed on military potential became an important issue in the Confederacy in 1863-64. General Patrick Cleburne said that zyxwv go. See, for example, Smith, Wealth of Nations, pp. 363-67;Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (Harmondsworth Penguin, 19761,pp. 303-304n.18. On the problem of biological reproduction, see Max Weber’sessay on “SocialCauses of the Decline of Ancient Civilization,” reprinted in Max Weber, The Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations, trans. R. I. Frank (London:New Left Books, 1976);Gavin Wright, “TheEfficiency of Slavery: Another Interpretation,” American Economic Review 69, no. 1 (March 1979): 219-26; Ste. Croix, Class Struggle, pp. 229-37. For criticism of the economic arguments, see Fogel, Without Consent or Contract, Chaps. 3,4.For criticisms of Ste. Croix’s argument about conflicts between biological reproduction and full economic exploitation, see Keith R. Bradley, “Wet-NursingAt Rome: A Study In Social Relations,”in Beryl Rawson, ed., The Family in Ancient Rome: New Perspectives (Ithaca:Cornell University Press, 19861,pp. 211-12. 91. Smith, Wealth ofNations, p. 365. 126 zyxw zyx zyxwvuts Philosophy G Public Affairs “slavery, from being one of our chief sources of strength at the commencement of the war, has now become, from a military point of view, one of our chief sources of weakness.” To remedy this weakness, he proposed to recruit an army of slaves, and in return to guarantee freedom “within a reasonable time to every slave in the South who shall remain true to the Confederacy.” But the slave-owning class resisted, and Confederate Congress did not authorize black enlistment until March 1865. As a Mississippi Congressman put it, “Victory itself would be robbed of its glory if shared with slaves.” A Georgian made the even more telling observation that “The day you make soldiers of them is the beginning of the end of the revolution. If slaves will make good soldiers our whole theory of slavery is wr0ng.”9~ A second, closely related point is that slave societies are constantly threatened by “two-front wars,” a problem that Aristotle counted among the chief considerations that make slavery a troublesome affair, thinking of the problems that the Thessalians faced from the Penestae, and that the helots gave to the Spartans, “forwhose misfortunes they are always lying in wait.”93 In such cases, the slaves either rebel or fight for the other side while the society is under attack.94 Because of these problems of limited military potential and two-front wars, military conflicts-including conflicts surrounding Islamic jihads-served as one of the principal historical stimuli to emancipation.95 The Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 is only the most familiar example of military manumission, and the failure of the Confederacy to enlist or manumit is, so to speak, the exception that proves the rule. In explaining his decision to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln said in July 1862 that he had concluded that emancipation was “a z zyxwv 92. Cited in James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York Oxford University Press, 1g88),pp. 832-35. 93. Aristotle, Politics, 1268b38. Lovejoy, “Problems of Slave Control,” p. 247, discusses an early nineteenth century example from the Oyo kingdom in the Sudan. 94. On the two-front war in the Confederate case, see Ira Berlin, Barbara J. Fields, Steven E Miller, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland, “The Destruction of Slavery,” in Slaves No More: Three Essays on Emancipatinn and thr Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, iggz), pp. 3-76. 95. Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, pp. 287-93; Wiedemann, Greek and Roman Slavery, pp. 64-8; Lovejoy, “Problems of Slave Control,” pp. 246-49. Analogously, military conflict has played an important role in democratization. See Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelyne Huber Stephens, and John D. Stephens, Capitalist Development and Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, iggz), pp. 70-71, 279. zyxwvutsrq 127 zyxw zy zyxwvutsr The Arc of the Moral Universe zyxw zyxwvuts military necessity, absolutely essential to the preservation of the Union. We must free the slaves or ourselves be subdued. The slaves were undeniably an element of strength to those who had their service, and we must decide that element should be with us or against us.”g6Bolivar and San Martin also used military manumission as a fundamental strategy in the Independence Wars in Spanish America, giving the fight for independence an antislavery cast.97 And a Roman imperial code compiled in A.D. 438 states that: Of course we believe that free-born persons are motivated by patriotism; nevertheless we exhort slaves too, by the authority of this edict, to offer themselves for the exertions of war as soon as possible, and if they take up arms as men fit for military service, they are to obtain the reward of freed0m.9~ In general, then, the conflicting-interestsview contends that the demise of slavery results in part from the practical advantages in competition and conflict available to systems less sharply in conflict with the interests of their members than slavery is-advantages expressed through mechanisms akin to natural selection. A problem for the conflicting interests theory is that it may appear to explain “too much.” Although conflicts between slavery and slave interests may have been fundamental and persistent, slavery was not in permanent crisis. But the conflicting interests account does not imply that it would be. That account is not intended to provide a comprehensive explanation of the evolution and demise of slavery, but rather to characterize one important, destabilizing determinant of that evolution. The importance and effects of conflicts between slave interests and slavery, manifest in internal opposition and in disadvantages in economic competition and military conflict, vary widely across systems of slavery and across social environments. More particularly, the pressures away from slavery produced by conflicts of interest are greatest in periods of military conflict, or when slaves are used as productive laborers in a system that produces for external markets, as distinct from cases in which slaves are “accumulated” as luxury goods or as outward displays of 96. MacPherson, Battle Cry, p. 504, and more generally, pp. 354, 490-510. 97. Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery 1776-1848 (London: Verso, 1988), Chap. 9. 98. Wiedemann, Greek and Roman SZavery, p p . 67-68. zy 128 zyxw zyx zyxwvutsr Philosophy G Public Affairs status, or when the ratio of slave to free is high, slaves are relatively homogeneous (ethnically and linguistically), and regularly brought into contact with other slaves, thus reducing the barriers to collective action. The importance and effects of conflicts between slave interests and slavery vary widely, then, across systems of slavery and across external environments. Absent the kinds of “environmental” factors I just mentioned, the problems rooted in conflicting interests will be less pressing. Despite such variations, however, slave systems do face viability problems resulting from forces internal to slavery and those problems are important in understanding what happens in “unfavorable” environments. Justice and Viability Thesis Four: Characterizing slavery as unjust conveys information relevant to explaining the demise of slavery that is not conveyed simply by noting that slavery conflicts with the interests of slaves. Suppose, then, that the conflict between slave interests and slavery limits the viability of slavery. What, then, does injustice have to do with limited viability?Why would the same limits not exist even if slave interests were not legitimate? What force is added to the explanation by noting that slave interests are morally weighty? I suggest two ways that our understanding of the limits of slavery is aided by noting that moral weight. The first is provided by considerations about the recognition of injustice. Recall where we left the discussion of that recognition: I indicated that moral convictions motivated some consequential opposition to slavery, and that the content of those convictions could reasonably be characterized by the ideal consensus conception of justice. Still, the injustice of slavery is not perhaps evident in this argument: How does the injustice itself shape the moral motivations of opponents? It be might be said that simple beliefs on the part of abolitionists and slaves that slavery is unjust suffice to motivate opposition, quite apart from the actual injustice of slavery. The objection seems to me not to have much force since it is natural to want an explanation of the moral beliefs as well. And part of the explanation for the moral belief is that slaves have interests in material wellbeing, autonomy, and dignity, and are recognized as having them; that slavery sharply conflicts with those interests, and is recognized as so conflicting; and that those interests are legitimate, and recognized as 129 zyxw zy zyxwvuts The Arc of the Moral Universe such. And why is this sequence of points not naturally captured by saying that people believe slavery to be unjust in part because it is unjust? To see why this rendering is appropriate, consider the force of the “because” in “because it is unjust.” We can interpret it as follows: Suppose people reason morally about the rightness or wrongness of slavery, and pursue that reasoning in light of an understanding of certain facts about slave interests and the conflict between slavery and those interests. Because the reasoning is moral, it is guided by the thought that the interests of slaves need to be given due consideration, as they are, for example, in the requirement of free agreement. Pursuing that reasoning, they will be driven to the conclusion that slavery is wrong: they do not see how slavery could result from a free agreement. (It is not that difficult to see how this might go: after all, we do something like this now when we ask whether slavery is wrong.) What is essential is to acknowledge that slaves have legitimate interests. And the key to that acknowledgment is to see that slaves have the properties-for example, the interests and the capacity for deliberate action-that others have (masters, or other members of the free population) in virtue of which people are prepared to attribute legitimate interests to those others. (Recallthe remark1 cited earlier: “The day you make soldiers of them is the beginning of the end of the revolution. If slaves will make good soldiers our whole theory of slavery is wrong.”) But this recognition is available to anyone who reflects on the practices that help to sustain slavery, in particular on the practice of providing the incentives that I mentioned earlier. For those incentives are in effect the homage paid by a scheme of domination to fundamental human aspirations; to provide them is in effect to acknowledge that slaves have the relevant interests and capacities.99 Recall, for example, my earlier discussion of the tension between the Aristotelian view that slaves lack a substantial capacity to deliberate and the argument that slaves will be made more cooperative by providing them with the prize of freedom. To offer freedom as a goal is to assume zyxwz gg. The incentives represent what is sometimes described as the “inherentcontradiction” of slavery: its treatment of human beings as though they were mere things. See G.W.EHegel, The Phenomenology ofspirit, trans. A. c! Miller (Oxford Oxford University Press, ig77), pp. 111-ig; Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York Random House, ig73), p. 463; David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966), pp. 25-27, 58-62. 130 zyxw zyx zyx zyxwvutsr Philosophy & Public Aflairs that slaves do have powers of foresight and self-control; otherwise the offer of freedom in the distant future would not be expected to shape current action. But this suggests the recognition that slaves have the powers that are relevant to their membership in the moral community, and so are bearers of legitimate interests. Or, to take a more prosaic example, consider the remark of a Wisconsin cavalry officer, made in light of the performance of the largely ex-slave,black soldiers in the Civil War: “I never believed in niggers before, but by Jaws they are hell in fighting.,’loo Suppose, then, that one comes to understand certain facts, all of which can be recognized independent from the procedures of moral reasoning: that slaves share the natural properties that are sufficient for being subjects of legitimate interests, that they have the fundamental interests, and that slavery sharply conflicts with those interests. Moral reasoning about slavery, proceeding in light of these facts, and giving due consideration to the interests of slaves, is bound to recognize the interests as legitimate and to condemn slavery as unjust. To say, then, that the wrongness of slavery explains the moral belief is to note the following: that moral reasoning mandates the conclusion that slavery is unjust; and that the moral belief is produced in part by that kind of reasoning. And once the injustice is recognized, it is reasonable to expect that that recognition plays some role in motivation, that it contributes to the antagonism of slaves to slavery, that it adds nonslave opponents to the slave opponents, and that, once slavery is abolished, it helps to explain why there are not strong movements to bring it back. The moral weight also figures implicitly in the conflicting interests view. To see how, keep in mind that an explanation of the demise of slavery is not simply an account of opposition to slavery, or of shifts away from slavery-an account of the evolution of institutional variation-but also an account of the eventual retention of nonslave arrangements, of the absence of “wandering” from slave to nonslave and then back. The competitive disadvantages of slave systems are important to understanding this retention. The conflict of slavery with legitimate slave interests, and the fact that masters’ interests in preserving slavery are not legitimate, plausibly helps to “tip the balance” in favor of stable departures from slavery. 100. zyxwvu zyxwvu Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long, p. 101. 131 zyxw zyxw zy zyxwvutsr The Arc of the Moral Universe To see how, consider a remark from a nineteen-year-old black soldier and ex-slave,who, after the Battle of Nashville, used his furlough to pay a visit to his former mistress. She asked him: “You remember when you were sick and I had to bring you to the house and nurse you.” When he replied that he did remember, she responded: “And now you are fighting me.” To which the soldier said: “No’m, I ain’t fighting you. I’m fighting to get free.’’1o1 To appreciate the bearing of this remark on the issue here, recall that the rejection of slavery was reasonable and slave interests legitimate because the fundamental interests of slaves could be advanced consistent with the aim of reaching a free agreement. The fundamental interests that provide the basis for a reasonable rejection of slavery are shared by masters, and slavery imposes great hardship on slaves while alternatives to slavery do not impose a hardship on any other group comparable to the hardship imposed on slaves by slavery. Alternatives to slavery accommodate the interests of subordinate groups better than slavery does. Moreover, they provide substantial protections of the fundamental interests at the superordinate positions. By contrast, the slaveowner interest in maintaining slavery was not shared by slaves. Because slaves and masters shared the fundamental interests, slaves could reject slavery consistent with extending to masters the same standing that they desired for themselves. But masters could not have advanced their interest in maintaining slavery except by failing to extend to slaves the same recognition masters desired for themselves. These facts about common and conflicting interests are the basis for the moral condemnation of slavery. Suppose slave interests were not legitimate. Slaves might still have resisted just as much. But the economic and military disadvantages of slavery, the abolition of slavery, and the apparent stability of that abolition, would be more surprising. Suppose in particular that the fundamental interests were not capable of mutual satisfaction. Then we would expect dissatisfaction with abolition leading to struggles for its reimposition. We would also not expect any particular practical advantage to be conferred by the absence of slavery if those other systems conflicted with the interests of some of their members as sharply as slavery does with some of its members. For if the conflicts were as sharp, then they would have the same difficulties as slavery in eliciting cooper101. z zyxw Cited in Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long, p. 97. 132 zy zyxwvutsr Philosophy G Public Affairs ation. Of course, other systems of social subordination are also unjust. But slavery is on the extreme end of powerlessness; alternatives to it permit greater space for material improvement, increased scope for autonomy, and do not rest on an enslaving denial of dignity. So the sources of conflict and instability in the alternatives to slavery do not tend to produce returns to slavery. And the fact that those replacements are improvements with respect to justice makes the stability of the shift away from slavery less surprising. Thus the fact that there is not wandering back and forth between slavery and abolition reflects the fact that the fundamental slave interests were shared and so could serve as the basis of an agreement.lo2Stating that slavery is unjust and that slave interests are legitimate interests conveys all these relevant facts about the conflict between slavery and the interests of slaves. It represents a second, distinct reason for citing the injustice in an explanation of the end of slavery. We cite the injustice itself, first, then, to indicate that moral reasoning mandates a certain conclusion, that people arrived at the conclusion because they reasoned, and were motivated to act. And we cite it, second, to convey information about the features of the system and of the alternatives to it in virtue of which the moral reasoning condemns it as unjust, and to claim that those very features are a source of instability. I do not deny that there are other ways of conveying those features. One could simply state the properties of slavery-the conflict between slavery and slave interests-and of the alternatives, without taking a position on whether those properties indeed are what makes slavery unjust; in short (and putting the issue of recognition to the side), the fact that the properties are injustice-making is not itself a part of my argument. Still, they are, and can unobjectionably be presented via the moral classification. Moreover, that mode of presentation is morally important. For the world looks different if we think that injustice-making features limit the viability of systems that have them. In sum, then, we have no reason to correct William Williams or Theo- zyxw zyxw 102. It might be objected that the decline of slavery with the end of the Roman empire, and its reemergence with New World plantation slaveiy represent precisely such abolition and reimposition. But see William D. Phillips, Slavery From Roman Times to the Early Transatlantic Trade (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985);Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slauery: From the Baroque to the Modern 1492-1800 (London: Verso, 1997).Chap. 1. 133 zyxw zyxw zy zyxwvutsr The Arc of the Moral Universe dore Parker. Ethical explanations have some force, given certain plausible background beliefs about the connections between the satisfaction of fundamental interests and the justice of social forms, the tendency of people to act on their interests, and the relationship between the satisfaction of those interests and the viability of social arrangements (especially when those arrangements operate under conditions of competition and conflict). To be sure, an explanation of the demise of slavery might proceed without embracing the ethical account of that explanation, simply by citing the injustice-making properties-the properties moral reasoning singles out in condemning slavery. Injustice, in short, is not indispensable to the explanation. But this observation is no objection because my aim has not been to argue that slavery is really wrong, nor to demonstrate the objectivity of moral norms by indicating their indispensability to explanation, nor even to persuade people who do not give ethical explanations that they ought to start. Instead, starting from within morality and its concern about the relationship of moral norms to the social world, and premising that we (or some of us) give ethical explanations, I have asked whether more reflective forms of historical and social inquiry condemn that practice, and its relaxed attitude to the distinction between fact and value. My answer is a qualified: No. zyxw zyxwv n! SCAFFOLDAND THRONE Appeals to the injustice of slavery can play a role in explaining the demise of slavery. But that role is limited, no greater than the advantages conferred by moral improvements. Those limits in turn underscore the length of the arc of the moral universe. King often coupled his reference to that arc with a stanza from James Russell Lowell: Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne; Yet that scaffold sways the future, And behind the dim unknown Standeth God within the shadow Keeping watch above His own. Many of us do not share Lowell’s faith-or King’s-in a God who keeps watch above His own. But even if we do not, we can find some support 134 zyxw zy zyxwvutsr Philosophy G Public Affairs zyxw for the hopefulness of Lowell, King, and William Williams in the human aspirations and powers that shape the arc of our part of the moral universe.

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