Slavery And Morality

Can a murderer’s philosophy be moral? Some of life 's hardest problems require one to take a moral stance on an issue. The difficult part is not the action of taking the stance, but figuring out if that stance would be seen as moral. The morality of such stances cause debates all over the world, as the morality of the stance can differ from person to person. As Benedict states, “A normal action is one which falls well within the limits of expected behavior for a particular society,” and the expected behavior for such society can be seen as a list of criteria that is always changing because of culture (137). Benedict’s depiction is also true for morality, because, in society, the morality of an action is directly equated to its normality. However, …show more content…
Through time, the morality of a situation is most likely to have changed along with the society. For example, 18th-century slavery helped America grow at a rapid pace and was seen as the moral thing to do. Most 18th century pilgrims believed that the beneficial effects of slavery outweighed the suffering of the few, but in a mere 200-300 years, the morality of slavery has changed dramatically. If one were to have these views today, they would be tarnished and harshly opposed. “The very eyes with which we see the problem are conditioned by the long traditional habits of our own society,” because we now have better ways of manufacturing food, clothes, and other materials (137). Back in the 18th century, there were no cheaper means of getting mass labor to cultivate crops or manufacture materials. Slavery was the most logical option that followed the limits of expected behavior and was therefore seen as moral at the time. However, this does not mean that slavery was seen as moral all over the world in the 18th century, as morality is also relative to a society’s …show more content…
He supports this information by saying that if it is a mistake to judge another society, then we cannot say that we have become better through the use of past mistakes we have made. This is because those mistakes were not seen as “mistakes” in the time period in which the action took place. However, this is untrue. We can scale our moral progress by comparing our distant past to our recent past, as this does not include the time period that we currently live in. By doing this, we see the real moral progress of our society without any bias and with full evidence. However, the progress we see may change at any time because, like morality, the idea of whether we have had moral progress is also relative to the culture. Along with bringing up the loss of moral progress, Rachels believes that with moral relativity one could define actions as right or