It's worth noting that punishments for 'employing' unfree labour in the west are also often astonishingly small, when it's prosecuted at all. Despite there being a fair bit of it around few people end up in jail over it.
Western cultures were the ones who decided slavery was a universal sin and had to be eradicated everywhere.
Were they wrong?
Re:My Family’s Slave
by lacampbell on Tuesday May 16, 2017 @06:05PM
(#14353741)
No, they were not. Slavery is a universal wrong.
Only because we were fortunate enough that the culture that ended up banning it won out. In fact we are lucky that Western culture took this path at all.
Well, I agree. I just am surprised that its condemnation seems rather....muted in some of these replies.
Right or wrong is relative. Including slavery.
Re:My Family’s Slave
by lacampbell on Tuesday May 16, 2017 @10:23PM
(#14355120)
Wow that's super progressive. I'm not one for cultural relativism though, I'm afraid. I'm quite the reactionary, unenlightened provincial bore, with my outmoded beliefs like "slavery is unjustifiable".
Re:My Family’s Slave
by legolas2412 on Tuesday May 16, 2017 @09:18PM
(#14354844)
It's just about whether you believe in equality and freedom or not.
There are still whole races of people kept as slaves in sub-saharan Africa, for example. And I mean outright slavery, no ambiguity about it.
Abolitionism is a Eurocentric concept.
Another example from Asia. Two people were kept as slaves for 14 years in a tofu factory. This is in a developed country with a GDP per capita comparable to Spains. They were caught and fined 40k USD, no jail time.
http://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3105152