Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Agback" data-source="post: 245701" data-attributes="member: 5328">Rights of slave-ownersBy comparison with most historical examples, this is an extreme legal situation. Most systems gave slaves some rights, and very few allowed owners to kill their slaves with complete impunity. (Sparta did, and the ancient Norse, and maybe the Ante-Bellum USA. Athens and Rome did not.)For example, Roman convention entitled a home-bred slave to manumission at the age of thirty: which, however, the slave was entitled to refuse unless he had the skills to carry on in a trade or unless his owner made other provision for his support. An imported slave was similarly entitled to manumission after a fixed term of years.For another example, see Leviticus 25:39-55 for the rights of Jewish and non-Jewish slaves under the Law of Moses.Slaves in the Aztec empire could own property, even their own slaves. And the property of a slave was not the property of the slave's owner.Adam Smith made the interesting observation that the rights of slave-owners over their slaves are greatest in systems where the individual slave-owners have most political power, and that the rights of slaves are greatest where the law and the magistrates are least answerable to the slave-owners. In Smith's time the contrast was clearest between British and French colonies in the Americas: British slave-owners were the ruling classes of their colonies and slaves had few rights; French colonies were ruled by governors responsible only to Paris--the owners had few rights and the slaves had many. Thus some of the worst historical examples of the treatment of slaves come from Sparta and the ante-Bellum USA, where all the magistrates were substantial slave-owners, where most slave-owners were or expected to become office-holders, and where the slave-owners dominated politics. And the best examples of the treatment of slaves come from authoritatian states such as Imperial Rome.Anyway, if this setting is one of those that allows slave-owners to murder their slaves with legal impunity, then it is unusual, and I would have no hesitation in classifying it as evil.Regards,Agback</blockquote>

Verification