How many deaths would have been an acceptable price for abolition of slavery?

[mencken]

Discuss with maps.

[angus]

What a weird question.  I haven't been enslaved, or dead, so I can't say which is worse or make any universally-qualified statements such as "I'd rather be dead than a slave" or "well, slavery sucks, but it beats pushing up dasies."  Still, it strikes me as a very weird question that might be better placed in the "off topic" board, or to a philosophy class.

Didn't vote.

[OSR stands with Israel]

What ever it took, slavery had to be abolished no matter the price .

[Since I'm the mad scientist proclaimed by myself]

At what point would the deaths have outweighed the rather extreme negative effects of slavery? That would be your answer.

[Cashew]

What ever it took, slavery had to be abolished no matter the price .

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

Historical necessity. Useless to whine about it after the fact due to some modernistic conception of "human rights" or "dignity". How many deaths would have been an acceptable price for democracy?

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

This seems like one of those dumb trolly ethical dilemmas.

[Intell]

Infinity.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Any moral philosophy that claims to provide a definitive answer to questions like this, or that even posits that questions like this are worth giving a lot of thought to, is not a sound moral philosophy.

(In other words, what Averroes said.)

[Associate Justice PiT]

     Arithmetic does not apply to questions of human life.

[RFayette]

     Arithmetic does not apply to questions of human life.

This. 

The notion that human beings can be quantified as a "price" in relation to some other moral goal is absurd.

[angus]

At what point would the deaths have outweighed the rather extreme negative effects of slavery? That would be your answer.

Certainly you could come up with a negative economic value for slavery.  Adam Smith understood and wrote about it as early as 1775:  "From the experience of all ages and nations, I believe, that the work done by free men comes cheaper in the end than the work performed by slaves. Whatever work he does, beyond what is sufficient to purchase his own maintenance, can be squeezed out of him by violence only, and not by any interest of his own."  You could project the costs of purchasing and maintaining slaves, to be passed on to the consumer of the goods produced by their labor, onto a time period of one year.  You could also find a value of a human life for one year by assuming a worker's average contribution to the GDP and dividing it by the number of years that the human is able to work.  Divide the former by the latter and round to the nearest integer and you'll have your answer.

That seems to me rather like the description of measuring poetry on a page which Robin Williams' character had the students rip out of a literature book in Dead Poets Society.  Create a cartesian co-ordinate plane and place the importance of the poem on one axis and its artfulness on the other and determine the area of the rectangle created.  This will give you the value of the poem. 

That page deserved to be ripped out of the book.  Poetry, like the value of a human life, probably shouldn't be measured this way.  The morality which allows one to measure human lives in units of political goals seems as impoverished as the morality which encourages enslavement of men. 

[Sprouts Farmers Market ✘]

Slavery is still ongoing and little is being done about it, so clearly very few.

[Since I'm the mad scientist proclaimed by myself]

At what point would the deaths have outweighed the rather extreme negative effects of slavery? That would be your answer.

Certainly you could come up with a negative economic value for slavery.  Adam Smith understood and wrote about it as early as 1775:  "From the experience of all ages and nations, I believe, that the work done by free men comes cheaper in the end than the work performed by slaves. Whatever work he does, beyond what is sufficient to purchase his own maintenance, can be squeezed out of him by violence only, and not by any interest of his own."  You could project the costs of purchasing and maintaining slaves, to be passed on to the consumer of the goods produced by their labor, onto a time period of one year.  You could also find a value of a human life for one year by assuming a worker's average contribution to the GDP and dividing it by the number of years that the human is able to work.  Divide the former by the latter and round to the nearest integer and you'll have your answer.

That seems to me rather like the description of measuring poetry on a page which Robin Williams' character had the students rip out of a literature book in Dead Poets Society.  Create a cartesian co-ordinate plane and place the importance of the poem on one axis and its artfulness on the other and determine the area of the rectangle created.  This will give you the value of the poem. 

That page deserved to be ripped out of the book.  Poetry, like the value of a human life, probably shouldn't be measured this way.  The morality which allows one to measure human lives in units of political goals seems as impoverished as the morality which encourages enslavement of men. 

I wasn't talking in an economic sense...

[angus]

I wasn't talking in an economic sense...

well, then, it's worse than I thought.  (actually, it was obvious that you weren't talking in an economic sense but I was being generous)  Since you're willing to bring it up:  If you're not measuring the economy of it, you must be trying to put a price on the intrinsic value of a human life vis-a-vis political goals. 

That's some serious Che Guevara shit right there.  ("¡¿Qué vale la vida de un hombre cuando está en peligro el futuro de la humanidad?!")  I'll wash my hands of this whole sordid business and leave it to the rest of you to figure out that price.

[°Leprechaun]

zero

[RINO Tom]

The enslavement of human beings was evil, period.  I have an idealistic view that evil (in the form of institutional slavery, genocide or whatever) must be stopped, and the cost might seem very high but is worth it.

[°Leprechaun]

The enslavement of human beings was evil, period.  I have an idealistic view that evil (in the form of institutional slavery, genocide or whatever) must be stopped, and the cost might seem very high but is worth it.

The cost of war is not just very high, it's always too high, and therefore not cost effective. The peace dividend is also very high, and can be used to stop war dead in it's track.
Pacifism is the way. War is the problem. Peace is the result of impeccable logic. War is the result of specious logic. As simple as all this is, most people just can't seem to get it. I don't understand why, but I know it is because people are not logical enough. Why people choose the dark side over the light is a mystery, and doesn't bode well for us as a species.

[Since I'm the mad scientist proclaimed by myself]

I wasn't talking in an economic sense...

well, then, it's worse than I thought.  (actually, it was obvious that you weren't talking in an economic sense but I was being generous)  Since you're willing to bring it up:  If you're not measuring the economy of it, you must be trying to put a price on the intrinsic value of a human life vis-a-vis political goals. 

That's some serious Che Guevara shit right there.  ("¡¿Qué vale la vida de un hombre cuando está en peligro el futuro de la humanidad?!")  I'll wash my hands of this whole sordid business and leave it to the rest of you to figure out that price.

Believing that people should be pragmatic and try to reduce and avoid human suffering as much as possible is worse then valuing human lives merely by economic output? Your definition of reprehensible is f**ked up.

[Goldwater]

The enslavement of human beings was evil, period.  I have an idealistic view that evil (in the form of institutional slavery, genocide or whatever) must be stopped, and the cost might seem very high but is worth it.

The cost of war is not just very high, it's always too high, and therefore not cost effective. The peace dividend is also very high, and can be used to stop war dead in it's track.
Pacifism is the way. War is the problem. Peace is the result of impeccable logic. War is the result of specious logic. As simple as all this is, most people just can't seem to get it. I don't understand why, but I know it is because people are not logical enough. Why people choose the dark side over the light is a mystery, and doesn't bode well for us as a species.

Ah yes, I'm sure that pacifism would have been quite effective at stopping things like slavery and Nazism!

[°Leprechaun]

The enslavement of human beings was evil, period.  I have an idealistic view that evil (in the form of institutional slavery, genocide or whatever) must be stopped, and the cost might seem very high but is worth it.

The cost of war is not just very high, it's always too high, and therefore not cost effective. The peace dividend is also very high, and can be used to stop war dead in it's track.
Pacifism is the way. War is the problem. Peace is the result of impeccable logic. War is the result of specious logic. As simple as all this is, most people just can't seem to get it. I don't understand why, but I know it is because people are not logical enough. Why people choose the dark side over the light is a mystery, and doesn't bode well for us as a species.

Ah yes, I'm sure that pacifism would have been quite effective at stopping things like slavery and Nazism!

Actually, no, but that isn't the point.

[Antonio the Sixth]

I wasn't talking in an economic sense...

well, then, it's worse than I thought.  (actually, it was obvious that you weren't talking in an economic sense but I was being generous)  Since you're willing to bring it up:  If you're not measuring the economy of it, you must be trying to put a price on the intrinsic value of a human life vis-a-vis political goals. 

That's some serious Che Guevara shit right there.  ("¡¿Qué vale la vida de un hombre cuando está en peligro el futuro de la humanidad?!")  I'll wash my hands of this whole sordid business and leave it to the rest of you to figure out that price.

Believing that people should be pragmatic and try to reduce and avoid human suffering as much as possible is worse then valuing human lives merely by economic output? Your definition of reprehensible is f**ked up.

You do realize the most effective way to end human suffering is to kill all humans, right?

[mencken]

I wasn't talking in an economic sense...

well, then, it's worse than I thought.  (actually, it was obvious that you weren't talking in an economic sense but I was being generous)  Since you're willing to bring it up:  If you're not measuring the economy of it, you must be trying to put a price on the intrinsic value of a human life vis-a-vis political goals. 

That's some serious Che Guevara shit right there.  ("¡¿Qué vale la vida de un hombre cuando está en peligro el futuro de la humanidad?!")  I'll wash my hands of this whole sordid business and leave it to the rest of you to figure out that price.

Believing that people should be pragmatic and try to reduce and avoid human suffering as much as possible is worse then valuing human lives merely by economic output? Your definition of reprehensible is f**ked up.

You do realize the most effective way to end human suffering is to kill all humans, right?

Most respondents to this poll seem to agree.

[Since I'm the mad scientist proclaimed by myself]

I wasn't talking in an economic sense...

well, then, it's worse than I thought.  (actually, it was obvious that you weren't talking in an economic sense but I was being generous)  Since you're willing to bring it up:  If you're not measuring the economy of it, you must be trying to put a price on the intrinsic value of a human life vis-a-vis political goals. 

That's some serious Che Guevara shit right there.  ("¡¿Qué vale la vida de un hombre cuando está en peligro el futuro de la humanidad?!")  I'll wash my hands of this whole sordid business and leave it to the rest of you to figure out that price.

Believing that people should be pragmatic and try to reduce and avoid human suffering as much as possible is worse then valuing human lives merely by economic output? Your definition of reprehensible is f**ked up.

You do realize the most effective way to end human suffering is to kill all humans, right?

Death is kind of a bad thing, though. And it also ends all good things in life.

[Antonio the Sixth]

I wasn't talking in an economic sense...

well, then, it's worse than I thought.  (actually, it was obvious that you weren't talking in an economic sense but I was being generous)  Since you're willing to bring it up:  If you're not measuring the economy of it, you must be trying to put a price on the intrinsic value of a human life vis-a-vis political goals. 

That's some serious Che Guevara shit right there.  ("¡¿Qué vale la vida de un hombre cuando está en peligro el futuro de la humanidad?!")  I'll wash my hands of this whole sordid business and leave it to the rest of you to figure out that price.

Believing that people should be pragmatic and try to reduce and avoid human suffering as much as possible is worse then valuing human lives merely by economic output? Your definition of reprehensible is f**ked up.

You do realize the most effective way to end human suffering is to kill all humans, right?

Death is kind of a bad thing, though. And it also ends all good things in life.

Why is death a bad thing? Dead people don't suffer (unless you believe in hell, which I don't think you do), so obviously it can't be on account of suffering.