Philosophy meme

balderdash@lemmy.zip to Lemmy Shitpost@lemmy.world – 296 points –

Not sure why this got removed from 196lemmy..blahaj.zone but it would be real nice if moderation on Lemmy gave you some sort of notification of what you did wrong. Like an automatic DM or something

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Honest question: if a person living in the west in the 21st century thinks they should have the right to take people of a different race as their own personal slaves, do you think there is no basis to call this person immoral? The best we can do is say that this person is incompatible with the time and place they are in?

We in the west have a basis to call this person immoral.

The places where slavery is legal do not have that basis.

Ask the slaves that lol. That argument is moot because it relies on legitimizing the oppression committed by slavers by not seeing enslaved people as part of the population/group. Their history was not recorded the same way the slaver's history was, yet they were still humans that thought about, talked about, and theorized about morality too. You don't get to claim to know the group consensus of a past society just because slavers used oppression to erase the viewpoints of those who disagreed.

That's a very good point. Moral relativism can be true and oppressors can still be bad.

a person living in the west in the 21st century

This qualifier alone shows that "objective" moral truth is defined only by where/when you live. You're also showing your own modern western bias here.