How come ancient men didn't view slavery as the ultimate injustice like how we see it now? I can't wrap my head around that it was acceptable for so long.
Because the anti slavery movement in the British empire was a reaction to the degradation of said empire. Meaning abolitionism is a type of progressivism not rooted in logic but created by politicians as a scapegoat for reforming what the public perceived as social and moral degradation in society
>>18102916Many authors of the past have explained this at lengths. I speak in their behalf when I say that slavery has always been based on ethnicity and race. So were and are all forms of servitude. It began in stone age. The more capable ethnicities would enslave the racially inferior ones. This is the only way in wich social stratification ever occured in history: in ethnically homogenous societies, there is hierarchy, but only a very permeable and relative one, in the same way at family gatherings no one can declare himself King above all others without being ridiculed or even beaten for it. Everything is shared and benefitted by the group, individuals count for little, they are just another stupid relative. Social hierarchies only happen when two ethnicities clash against each other; once the superiority of one ethnicity is established, the power struggle is laid down and the inferior ethnicity serves the other one under the rug.This social stratification brings progress. Stone age tribes evolved into bronze age tribes and became capable of conquering more lands and ethnicities. Their identities became wiped out; usually only the name of the superior ethnicity remained. The slaves assumed their identity under the banner of civilization, appropiating their language and their religion.Soon the former ethnic antagonism becomes forgotten and is replaced by class antagonisms. The slaves may forget their whole identity and still remember the turpitudes they had to suffer under their masters.
slavery in Athens didn't seem so bad as long as you didn't work in the mines.
>>18102916The fundamental equality of all humans has only become widely accepted quite recently. It was not the prevailing view for most of human history.
>>18102916Read the old myths like Enuma Elish and whatnot, humans were viewed almost as garbage basically just made to be the gods slaves to feed them and do their menial laber. People used to like watching others die in gladiator arenas and would leave babies out to die by exposure. Human life just wasn't seen to possess intrinsic value, your value came from what you provided. Slavery only got abolished because christianity assigned a mythic value to humans by saying they're made in the image of God and god himself was a powerless peasant who got executed by the state.Also we basically still have slavery BTW in how poor people in 3rd world countries are paid basically nothing while the rest of us live better than the ancient kings. But this doesn't disturb the mythical sensibilities that led to its being abolished.
>>18103024Exactly. Ancient people were careless about slaves in the same way moderns are careless about their smartphones being made by African child miners. Most don't even acknowledge the vericity of this fact. They don't even think about it for a split second of their day.
>>18102919The British Empire was on the rise in the early 19th century. >>18102941Slavery in Rome, Greece and Arabia also encompassed natives. >>18103037Slaves were an omnipresent part of life.
>>18103083And who were all the snivelling progressives pushing for abolitionism?
>>18103100Educated people who abhorred thar abomination of a practice.
>>18103102>Educated>Politicians
>>18102916Slavery is not a single historical practice. It had been a whole lot of wildly different things.Under hammurabi's code if you get a female slave pregnant you are no longer allowed to sell her, and if a slave marries a free woman their children cannot be enslaved. Athenian slaves could save their earnings to purchase their freedom. Objectively how different where the lives of slaves to poor farmers in many societies? Do you live in a society that still subjects people to forced labor as punishment for crime?
>>18102916They did kinda view it as an injustice, but injustice was ok as long as it was the strong taking from the weak. The ancient moral paradigm didn't really have a place for injustice as we conceive of it now, it did not apply across the board, injustice only was due to those that should otherwise have prevented it.
>>18104409Ancient morals were not a xitter meme, retard.
>>18102916Well, do you eat meat
>>18104432I am the origin of that meme
>>18102916Lots of answers already, and none came close to the fundamental reason.Slavery solved the problem of what to do with defeated enemies. If left free, they could come back and get revenge. Killing them was not only wasteful but also too uncivilized, as death was seen as the worst you could inflict on someone. So slavery solved that issue; you not only don't have to kill them, but they become useful assets for the community.Nowadays, thanks to jewish morals, death is seen like a prize, while working for free is the worst thing you could impose on someone.
Greco Roman slavery was more like indentured servitude. It was based on economic status not race (though different races of slaves were often given different jobs. For instance Greek slaves were used as teachers whereas niggers were used for salt mining) many ancient slaves actually had very important jobs as advisors and managers. Tell me though why do modern men not object to wage slaving in an Amazon warehouse?
>>18104591Bezos cant sell your children to be sex slaves on some island and he cant cut your balls off either.
>>18102916Because nobody cared about losers back then and your rights for were forfeited after you lost to the winning tribe/thread
>>18104612>slaves were only POWs You are retarded
>>18104603>Bezos cant sell your children to be sex slaves on some island
>>18104617funny
>>18102916Ancient people were okay with slavery because slavery was necessary. Someone had to do these various grueling tasks, liking mining, agriculture, and rowing the oars of ships, and free men wouldn't voluntarily do those jobs, so people had to tolerate the institution of slavery if they wanted the economy to function. It's no coincidence that opposition to slavery in Europe and America became widespread at basically the exact same moment that the early stages of the industrialization allowed for an alternative to most crops being picked by hand. Most people will naturally ignore or try to justify any harmful practice that they deem essential to their way of life. I wouldn't be at all surprised if a few centuries from now, people living in societies with a high degree of automation will look back at our own time with the same sense of abhorrence and moral outrage at the institution of wage labor that we now feel towards slavery. There will be some smugly superior future-person saying that we must have all been stupid or evil to use people to do tasks that are obviously meant for robots.
>>18104640>rowing the oars of shipsThat was a highly professional, well paid and respected profession. It was just turkroaches who used slaves for that.
The question assumes slavery was always seen as the “ultimate injustice,” but that judgment is historically recent. In my model, this shift results from a transformation in how agency and personhood are understood. Human beings exist within a relational field—communication is the basic structure of human reality. Agency is not a luxury; it is the precondition of communication. To negate agency is to reduce a person from subject to instrument, and this collapse is structural violence.Ancient societies did not universally condemn slavery because they lacked a universal ontology of the human. Their worldviews were hierarchical: gods over mortals, rulers over subjects, citizen over foreigner, free over slave. Moral concern was limited to the in-group; humanity was distributed by rank, not assumed equally. Slavery did not appear as a violation of personhood because personhood itself was not yet universalized. Those outside kin, city, or tribe existed as utility bodies—legally human but ontologically disposable.This was not simply moral failure but ontological limitation. Communication was understood as command and obedience, not reciprocal co-creation between equal agents. Only as relational awareness expanded—through Stoic cosmopolitanism (logos), Christian universal moral address (imago Dei), Islamic recognition of shared accountability (fitra), and Enlightenment natural rights—did the field of recognition widen. Abolition did not come from sentiment but from the discovery of a contradiction: systems of domination collapse communication and therefore reality between persons.Slavery is now condemned not just for cruelty but for its metaphysical nature: it is the conversion of a communicative being into property. It attacks what makes us human—the ability to answer, to participate in meaning. That is why slavery is not just economic exploitation. It is the attempted erasure of a soul.
*has entered the chat*
Ask yourself: if ancient people “didn’t see slavery as wrong,” does that make slavery any less destructive—or does it reveal something about how slowly civilizations recognize structural violence? Moral blindness isn’t innocence. It’s dependency on a system one refuses to examine because it benefits the dominant group.People in slave societies weren’t confused—they built elaborate narratives to justify domination: “natural slaves” (Aristotle), “slaves by fate,” “slaves by conquest,” “slaves by sin,” “slaves by race.” When someone invents that many stories to justify an institution, it proves one thing: they knew they were doing something that required justification.So the real question is not why they didn’t feel it was wrong. The real question is:What prevents people from recognizing another human being as a subject rather than a tool?And that question is still alive today—because slavery never disappeared. It just changed vocabulary: trafficking, debt bondage, forced labor, coercive power structures in supply chains, manipulation that strips agency instead of chains that bind wrists.If a society defines personhood too narrowly, it will always produce slaves. The cure is not moral posturing but expanding recognition—learning to see the other as a being whose voice is as real as your own. Without that, slavery will always return under new names.
