Slavery and Origins of Its Discontents

Abstract

Aristotle believed that some people are slaves by nature and that for them the condition of slavery is just and beneficial. This outlook is a consequence of key aspects of his philosophy. First, since the concepts of acting and being acted upon are used as basic categories of thinking, any change and movement is conceived as an asymmetric relation, where something acts and something else undergoes action, while the more a thing is able to act, the closer it is to perfection. Second, since nature makes no leaps, there are intermediate links between man and animal. People closest to animals and, therefore, least able to act, are naturally predisposed to follow the orders of their superiors.

Immanuel Kant carried out the most influential reform of Aristotelianism in modern times. He removed acting and being acted upon from the list of categories, and placed man outside physical nature, attributing to him the quality of moral personality, which has no preconditions in animals. As a moral being, man, alone in nature, retained the ability to act and undergo action. Slavery turned out more or less unacceptable, because all people were deemed free in their ability to act and equal in this absolute privilege over the rest of nature. At the same time, the very concepts of slavery and man began not so much to refer to specific phenomena as to express their moral and legal assessment. This referential ambiguity is a cause of discontents that the topic of slavery continues to generate today.