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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9531229" data-attributes="member: 6790260">I mean, I do feel pretty confident in saying that if you don't depict slavery as morally wrong, you've screwed up.Just because you depict it as morally wrong doesn't mean it stops happening. There's lots of morally wrong things, that the vast majority of humans agree are morally wrong, that people still do. (I was reading earlier today about one example, a woman asking for relationship advice because one of her boyfriend's coworkers told her he had cheated on her with a male employee while visiting Colorado....and when she approached him about it, he claimed the altitude made him temporarily gay, and thus he hadn't cheated on her, he wasn't in control of his actions.)As a similar example: I would not tolerate a piece of media that portrayed child abuse as morally neutral, or worse, somehow morally positive. Especially in the latter case, I would actively campaign against its creators as literally promoting harm to children. I don't think that's an unreasonable position to take. Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences of speech--it means you should be allowed to express ideas without the powers-that-be silencing you solely because of content (unless they have a very very good reason, which does, occasionally, actually happen.)Hell, you want an actual historically-relevant example here? One of the things chivalric tales of knighthood were written for was as propaganda....but not propaganda for the serfs, simply for the rather important reason that most of them couldn't even read to begin with, and wouldn't have had time (nor interest, most likely) even if they could. No, this was propaganda targeting the knights themselves, to tell them to knock it the hell off with their abuses of the peasantry. Their lieges knew it was wrong, their serfs knew it was wrong, and even the knights themselves often knew it was wrong (certainly forbidden by Christianity.) But they still did these abusive things anyway because they believed they'd get away with it and wanted the benefits they'd derive from it. In other words...they were engaging in pretty blatantly evil behaviors, even by the standards of their own people, but they continued to do it nonetheless.So it is quite possible, and historically precedented, to have actions that are considered immoral overall by the culture engaging in them, but which still occur even when there isn't a power from above enforcing it.</blockquote>

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