For the actual slaves themselves, the worst slaveowners were the ones who whipped and tortured their slaves in an attempt to extract more value (or just for fun), those who separated children from parents, raped the women or forcibly bred them, and who killed their loved ones for relatively minor insubordination (or just for fun).
It's one of those pithy cocktail party quotes that is complete bullshit。
That's the thing, though: he wasn't speaking as an owned slave, but as a future sociologist/historian. So if they are the worst for future generations, why would it be bullshit that he's claiming they're the worst?
Maybe he simply isn't optimizing for immediate value, but for long-term value. And why would you be objecting to that?
It seems like the determination of worst would need to be made by someone who actually experienced these things, not someone who never experienced them or even saw them.
The point is that we are trying to do what we can now to make the world better later. It matters what those in the future will think of us, because they will be the ones with the resources to improve upon it after we are gone. And if we do it right, they will be better at handling this stuff than we are.
Of course, if you actually believe things can't improve, then by all means: maximize your own happiness.
Because they had a more direct experience of it than we can ever have.
I think the (even if implicit) claim that it is better to physically harm, rape, and kill slaves than to be nice to them is highly questionable.
Yes, both are bad situations, but adding additional physical violence doesn't make things better, only worse.
Edit: I guess I should also add that we can never truly know what someone else's experience was. It is especially difficult to know if all you have left after hundreds of years is some text.
The alternate of nobody being beaten, but still being slaves where everybody is waffling and unsure about whether slavery is bad because nobody is being beaten seems to me a bit like a losing proposition. It's the same reason we can't do effective political reform today: people will choose their own convenience when they're not facing a visible evil as a group.
The last thing I would want is for people to think I got beaten because I'm a "naughty slave" or because my owner was a particularly bad guy. No, the reason I got beaten was because I couldn't choose my path. Because I was a slave, and slaves can't choose not to be beaten, even if they would prefer it. When a slave gets beaten, he or she is beaten by slavery as an institution, not by some violent individual.
How much different would the world be if Hitler had announced from day 1 his play to conquer Europe and massacre millions of people? Heck, if we had ended slavery 100 years earlier, maybe we'd be 100 years closer to managing global warming. We don't have time for evils to fester in the margins pretending to be nice.
I remember a couple years ago there was some politician saying we don't need minimum wage laws because companies already pay more than that, so the law is redundant. And in the name of "small government" declared that we should remove the law from the books. All because his favorite corporations are "nice slaveowners" who don't beat their slaves, he thinks that there's nothing wrong with destroying a very important institutional protection.
If (and it's a very big if), the only way to end slavery is to have slaves be beaten, then you might have a good point. However, I can think of no way to verify that, nor can I think of any evidence in support of that premise that can withstand even most most basic scrutiny.
>How much different would the world be if Hitler had announced from day 1 his play to conquer Europe and massacre millions of people?
How do you know he didn't?
This isn't just about slavery: it could apply to any war-like situation. But if you aren't being beaten as a slave, how are you resisting slavery? Your owner just lets you get away with not doing what you're told?
Because I really don't see how not resisting is supposed to end slavery, and I don't see how avoiding beatings is any kind of resistance.
If there were some highly effective and rapid communication system, for example, the slaves could possibly organize and GTFO before their owners had any way to stop them. Yes, there's the chance that it could turn bloody, but I can imagine scenarios where it might end peacefully (as far as one can imagine such a hypothetical).
Slaves are either compliant or tortured for not being compliant. That's why slavery is so brutal; if your owner doesn't beat you, he'll either kill you or sell you to someone who will. There's really no other option for dealing with a slave who refuses to obey. (And I don't see how a compliant slave can help end slavery.)
> I can imagine scenarios where it might end peacefully
How? People who legally own slaves aren't going to just let their slaves walk away anymore than any company now is going to let their employees walk away with all their profits.
In particular, Mein Kampf comes pretty close.
Regardless, I can't make decisions using information I don't have, so the question is pointless.
Then he's optimizing for his value. Which is a really narrow-minded way of looking at the situation. One would hope for a sociologist/historian to be more broad-minded than that.
But I'm not sure to what degree Oscar Wilde was really a sociologist or historian. He was mostly an author, and he specialized in saying things that were counter to society's values. I'm not sure to what degree he believed all of the things he said.
But in the quote in question, his position essentially is "do evil so that good may come". That's a pretty dubious sense of morality.
If anything the fact that some slavers where more personable means more people can conceive of such a system showing up again which will help avoid it.
That's like saying "What is the value in winning the lottery if I already have all the lottery money in the bank."
>If anything the fact that some slavers where more personable means more people can conceive of such a system showing up again which will help avoid it.
Or alternatively, it could convince people that slavery is not that bad. (Which is exactly the point he was making.) And now we're just betting on which is more likely: that nice slave owners will teach us that the evils of slavery can be hidden, or that they'll convince us slavery is not bad.
But those are the same thing. The way you hide the evil of slavery is by convincing people that it is deserved and just. You say "We don't need to pay our employees more, because they are not Titans of Industry like us, they are Welfare Leeches." His point was that you can fix it faster if it is obviously evil, and that is better than living for centuries in a society that doesn't value you.
This sounds like the US medical industry. We can only save you, if you work another few years of your life to pay down this debt.
If all slave owners treated their slaves really well, provide them with decent housing, gourmet food, education, social activities and entertainment, vacations, and etc, with the condition that they have to work, then there is probably not going to be a rebellion, and we'd still have slavery today.
Oh wait, did I just describe the condition what most of us live in?
In the end, rebellions happen when people don't have basic security. If in a future society, where the 1% people countrols 99% of the wealth, but even the poorest people get all the food, shelter, entertainment etc they need, I don't think there is going to be a rebellion like we see in history books.
http://www.vice.com/read/youre-single-because-there-arent-en...
“[Charity] is not a solution [to poverty]: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible…Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it, so, in the present state of things in England, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good…”