People KNEW slavery was wrong, but those in power did not want to admit it. The same way that we KNOW it's wrong to horde massive wealth while children go hungry and people do not have access to basic medical care.
Those people are your neighbors...unlike the billionaires that people harp on about. Monsters are all around you. Just look to your left and right.
Because child services is critically underfunded and poverty is rampaging through our country. The richest one on earth.
> Your neighbors who assault and beat their kids.
Yes, more monsters, but not on the scale of someone who enslaves children and adults en-masse in foreign countries in order to suppress wages in their own country.
> Those people are your neighbors...unlike the billionaires that people harp on about.
Not unlike each other at all. They are the same narcissists and psychopaths, just with less power.
My point is that it's easy to take our 2023 ethics and apply them to people in the 1700s but all that does is prove you don't have a proper context or frame of reference for history. It lets you conveniently ignore things in the most intellectually lazy way. I mean, look at my comment's parent and GP. In reverse order, a perfectly rational and reasonable point about how the framers drank a lot while writing a document that would found a new country (and perhaps the difference between how it affect those people vs. his family). And the knee-jerk, lazy, boring response of "yeah but SLAVES."
Do you think that this response is innovative and thoughtful? Somebody literally said that the framers of the US constitution were collectively some of the "most functional human beings in history" and they were reminded that those people were vile and violent. If you're a black American, you have a reasonable chance of being one of their descendants because they would buy human beings to rape.
They also accomplished many things, and some of them wrote very interesting things. Jefferson was often very insightful, but he also raped slaves. Lots of drunks have written interesting things.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_slavery_in_Georgia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Whitefield
Of course people knew slavery was wrong, but profits. We may not have slavery today, but the same kind of people are around, for example against minimum wage increases or for non-compete agreements.
> yeah but SLAVES
It's astounding to me that so many people completely missed the point that these two things are related.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that GP's family probably didn't have an army of black people doing all their chores and generating a healthy income stream to live off, for free, so that they could engage full-time in civics.
You almost certainly would not have, had you been born in the same period of time.
Let's not pretend that people in the past were monsters simply because they lived during the period of time they lived. Maybe they were all racist monsters by today's standards, but had they been born today they'd be completely different.