Interestingly, I have a somewhat more conservative view on children killing parents. In the case of a child killing their good, loving, non-abusive parent, it honestly does seem just as bad if not worse than a parent killing their *adult* child (so leaving aside the issue of the abuse of vulnerable minors).
For me, it isn't a matter of authority at all, but one of *gratitude*. Good parents sacrifice so much for their children that it seems peculiarly monstrous to repay this love and sacrifice with murder.
And, while authority obviously played a major role in pre-modern disproportionate horror at parricide, I do think gratitude was a major factor as well. Note that some ethical systems, like Buddhist morality, explicitly classified murdering one's *mother* as even worse than murdering one's father. In a patriarchal context, killing a father would be an even greater offense against authority--but killing one's mother would be an even greater sin against gratitude, given the even greater sacrifices mothers make.
Re: moral relativism when judging people of past eras, I think I would phrase it rather that it is _understandable_ why people did bad things (like hold others in slavery) given the context they were living in, and what their society was telling them was right / wrong, or acceptable / unacceptable, or normal / deviant. The people who were abolitionists in the context of the late 18th / early 19th century were doing something heroic. Obviously the world would be better if more of us had that kind of courage, but most of us just don't.
Contrariwise, people who will come out and speak _in favor_ of putting other supposedly-inferior classes of people in slavery, or argue that the South was doing people a favor by enslaving them (because at some statistical level, descendants of enslaved Africans are likely to be wealthier at this point than relatives who weren't enslaved), are engaging in a kind of moral anti-heroism. Bucking the consensus of your society in order to try to drag that consensus towards something _worse_ is a non-banal way to be evil.
So the framework is something like we look at the moral average, and then we focus on the vector people are pulling that moral average towards, rather than their absolute position? I like that.
On culpability, I think a third factor, perhaps more intensifying on our end than mitigating on the ancients’, is that in modern times you can acquire food, shelter, and clothes, and get these things cleaned, if not fully without slavery per se then without full awareness of the extent to which forced labor is involved. (We can now diffuse the responsibility, and often even shield ourselves in ignorance, of the shoes we wear and burgers we eat being produced by prisoners.) Certainly without directly owning or abusing slaves.
I’m not arguing in any way that at any point in history slavery was actually necessary for anyone’s survival, but to go without a personal household slave in a time when slavery was a norm would’ve represented more of a sacrifice than it does now, when (because of the new norm) you would *lose* social caché and gain little that you couldn’t get from buying or renting a machine.
This then seems to imply that to be as morally righteous as a slavery abolitionist of those eras, one would similarly have to be willing to give up at least some standard of comfort in defense of a moral position.
I think you may be a bit unfair to Abelard here, although not necessarily in a way that undermines your broader point. A few years back, I looked up the original context (after reading an earlier essay of yours where you mention this) and it seems like:
1) Least importantly, he wasn't specifically talking about slaves--he never explicitly referred to the killer-in-self-defense as a slave, just that he was killing his "dominus", which (especially in a medieval context) could mean "lord" in a much broader sense--e.g., a feudal lord and his vassal knight.
Now, granted, he's alluding to Augustine in this discussion of self-defense, and Augustine *was* explicitly talking about a slave killing his owner. But that gets at the real issue:
2) Both are talking about the legitimacy of self-defense in general, and using the case of a slave/subject killing their owner/lord as a kind of reductio ad absurdum--a case where they assume their audience will assume that *of course* self-defense isn't permissible--in order to argue for the pre-High-Medieval Christian consensus view that killing in individual self-defense is *never* permissible.
3) I don't remember exactly what Abelard said, but Augustine is talking about a slave killing his owner *in order to escape a non-lethal deserved punishment*, not killing a malicious owner trying to unjustly murder him. Granted, I'm sure that Roman consensus morality *would* have been horrified at the latter--US slave laws explicitly denied slaves the right to any lethal self-defense against their owners, after all. But it wouldn't have served Augustine's purpose of using it as a *clearly unjustifiable* reductio ad absurdum of wicked self-defense.
4) Interestingly, "L'Arbre des Batailles", a mid-1300s work on military ethics written by a priest (which takes a notably humanitarian line for its era in forbidding the killing or abuse of captive combatants and the plundering of civilians) is the only pre-modern work I've found which explicitly deals with the question of whether a slave can legitimately kill their owner in self-defense. It says that they can! Granted, the fact that it feels the need to discuss this as a controversial issue suggests that others thought they couldn't, even aside from general concerns about the legitimacy of self-defense.
Interestingly, I have a somewhat more conservative view on children killing parents. In the case of a child killing their good, loving, non-abusive parent, it honestly does seem just as bad if not worse than a parent killing their *adult* child (so leaving aside the issue of the abuse of vulnerable minors).
For me, it isn't a matter of authority at all, but one of *gratitude*. Good parents sacrifice so much for their children that it seems peculiarly monstrous to repay this love and sacrifice with murder.
And, while authority obviously played a major role in pre-modern disproportionate horror at parricide, I do think gratitude was a major factor as well. Note that some ethical systems, like Buddhist morality, explicitly classified murdering one's *mother* as even worse than murdering one's father. In a patriarchal context, killing a father would be an even greater offense against authority--but killing one's mother would be an even greater sin against gratitude, given the even greater sacrifices mothers make.
We should chat soon btw Morgan, it's been too long.
Yes!! What time would be good?
Re: moral relativism when judging people of past eras, I think I would phrase it rather that it is _understandable_ why people did bad things (like hold others in slavery) given the context they were living in, and what their society was telling them was right / wrong, or acceptable / unacceptable, or normal / deviant. The people who were abolitionists in the context of the late 18th / early 19th century were doing something heroic. Obviously the world would be better if more of us had that kind of courage, but most of us just don't.
Contrariwise, people who will come out and speak _in favor_ of putting other supposedly-inferior classes of people in slavery, or argue that the South was doing people a favor by enslaving them (because at some statistical level, descendants of enslaved Africans are likely to be wealthier at this point than relatives who weren't enslaved), are engaging in a kind of moral anti-heroism. Bucking the consensus of your society in order to try to drag that consensus towards something _worse_ is a non-banal way to be evil.
So the framework is something like we look at the moral average, and then we focus on the vector people are pulling that moral average towards, rather than their absolute position? I like that.
On culpability, I think a third factor, perhaps more intensifying on our end than mitigating on the ancients’, is that in modern times you can acquire food, shelter, and clothes, and get these things cleaned, if not fully without slavery per se then without full awareness of the extent to which forced labor is involved. (We can now diffuse the responsibility, and often even shield ourselves in ignorance, of the shoes we wear and burgers we eat being produced by prisoners.) Certainly without directly owning or abusing slaves.
I’m not arguing in any way that at any point in history slavery was actually necessary for anyone’s survival, but to go without a personal household slave in a time when slavery was a norm would’ve represented more of a sacrifice than it does now, when (because of the new norm) you would *lose* social caché and gain little that you couldn’t get from buying or renting a machine.
This then seems to imply that to be as morally righteous as a slavery abolitionist of those eras, one would similarly have to be willing to give up at least some standard of comfort in defense of a moral position.
That's a really good point
I think you may be a bit unfair to Abelard here, although not necessarily in a way that undermines your broader point. A few years back, I looked up the original context (after reading an earlier essay of yours where you mention this) and it seems like:
1) Least importantly, he wasn't specifically talking about slaves--he never explicitly referred to the killer-in-self-defense as a slave, just that he was killing his "dominus", which (especially in a medieval context) could mean "lord" in a much broader sense--e.g., a feudal lord and his vassal knight.
Now, granted, he's alluding to Augustine in this discussion of self-defense, and Augustine *was* explicitly talking about a slave killing his owner. But that gets at the real issue:
2) Both are talking about the legitimacy of self-defense in general, and using the case of a slave/subject killing their owner/lord as a kind of reductio ad absurdum--a case where they assume their audience will assume that *of course* self-defense isn't permissible--in order to argue for the pre-High-Medieval Christian consensus view that killing in individual self-defense is *never* permissible.
3) I don't remember exactly what Abelard said, but Augustine is talking about a slave killing his owner *in order to escape a non-lethal deserved punishment*, not killing a malicious owner trying to unjustly murder him. Granted, I'm sure that Roman consensus morality *would* have been horrified at the latter--US slave laws explicitly denied slaves the right to any lethal self-defense against their owners, after all. But it wouldn't have served Augustine's purpose of using it as a *clearly unjustifiable* reductio ad absurdum of wicked self-defense.
4) Interestingly, "L'Arbre des Batailles", a mid-1300s work on military ethics written by a priest (which takes a notably humanitarian line for its era in forbidding the killing or abuse of captive combatants and the plundering of civilians) is the only pre-modern work I've found which explicitly deals with the question of whether a slave can legitimately kill their owner in self-defense. It says that they can! Granted, the fact that it feels the need to discuss this as a controversial issue suggests that others thought they couldn't, even aside from general concerns about the legitimacy of self-defense.
I must check out L'Arbre des Batilles