LewRockwell By Wanjiru Njoya
Much has been said about the role of slavery in the history of the United States, and while that history cannot be recounted in a brief article, it is important to clarify some of the ethical principles underpinning the institution of slavery in light of contemporary debates about reparations for slavery. A number of states have expressed an intention to pay slavery reparations. For example, the New York Times reports that,
Almost 200 years after slavery officially ended in New York, the City Council passed legislation Thursday authorizing a commission to study the devastating effects of human bondage and to develop a plan to make reparations for the harms caused.
In these debates, rather than confine ourselves to considering whether the states generously offering to pay reparations can even afford it—as the reparations bill from California alone is said to amount to $800 billion—it is also important to address the underlying ethical concerns.
Unethical and immoral
From a Rothbardian perspective, the reason why slavery is wrong is that it violates the principle of self-ownership. Self-ownership is a natural right vested in all human beings, from which it follows that no man can own another. In the Ethics of Liberty, Rothbard cites with approval the following quote from William Lloyd Garrison:
The right to enjoy liberty is inalienable…. Every man has a right to his own body—to the products of his own labor—to the protection of law…. That all these laws which are now in force, admitting the right of slavery, are, therefore, before God, utterly null and void…and therefore they ought instantly to be abrogated.
From the perspective of Roman law, Edgar Shumway explains that slavery was a legal institution founded in both the law of persons and the law of property: the slave was,
…an object of property and possession, alienable like other property…but the fact that the slave was a human being differentiated him from other objects of property, and assimilated his position in certain important respects to that of a descendant under parental power.
Clearly, examined in light of Rothbard’s principles of ethics, Roman law on this point is unethical and immoral. But it is one thing to pronounce that historic legal codes were “ethically unsatisfactory,” as Shumway puts it, and quite another to assert that something ought now to be done to cure and redress the historic wrong. This is where the “reparations” activists go astray…
READ FULL ARTICLE HERE… (lewrockwell.com)
Home | Caravan to Midnight (zutalk.com)
