The Most Terrifying Truth About Slavery: It Made Sense at the Time
Slavery isn’t a glitch in human history — it’s a feature. And its logic still governs more of our world than we want to admit.
Image created by author using DALL-E.
There are few feelings more degrading than realizing someone believes they own you, not your heart, not your loyalty, but your time. Your minutes. Your hours. Your life, sliced into units they think they can spend however they please.
Most of us get glimpses of it in dead-end jobs, abusive relationships, and bureaucracies that treat bodies like inventory. Even small doses of that theft spark anger and resentment.
Now imagine theft made total, legal, and sacred. Imagine being born into a world where your existence itself- your breath, your sweat, your children—belonged to someone else.
Not because you agreed, not because you failed, but because society said you were less than fully human.
And now ask: How did we ever convince ourselves this was normal?
Beyond Individual Pathology
It would be comforting to write off historical slavery as a moral failure unique to the past. But the more disturbing truth is this: slavery thrived not despite civilization, but because of it. It emerged not from hatred alone, but from a deeper priority that still governs our choices today — economic success over human life. When societies are forced to choose between prosperity and morality, history shows us which one usually wins.
In agricultural civilizations, where manual labor determined whether communities starved or thrived, the capture and exploitation of outside groups presented a practical solution to labor shortages. War created prisoners who became property. Economic incentives reinforced these practices, building systems where moral considerations became secondary to perceived necessity (Patterson, 1982). These mechanisms of moral disengagement, which allowed societies to justify and perpetuate slavery, continue to influence our moral frameworks today, underscoring the need for continued vigilance and ethical reflection.
Even the architects of modern democracy were not immune. Many of America’s Founding Fathers, who enshrined liberty as a core national value, also owned human beings. They rationalized this contradiction using the exact mechanisms — dehumanization, economic self-interest, moral disengagement — that earlier societies had perfected (Wiencek, 2012). The existence of slavery in a nation founded on freedom is not an anomaly; it is proof of how deeply normalization can coexist with lofty ideals.
Slavery was not a deviation from social norms — it was the norm itself, woven into the economic, legal, and social fabric.
The Architecture of Moral Disengagement
What is particularly disturbing about historical slavery is not that it represented some collective madness, but rather how methodically it was justified. Societies did not simply overlook moral qualms — they built elaborate frameworks to neutralize them:
Dehumanization: By categorizing enslaved people as fundamentally different or inferior, societies created a psychological distance that suppressed natural empathy. Ancient Greeks distinguished between those “naturally free” and those “naturally enslaved” (Aristotle, c. 350 BCE/1998). American slavery developed complex racial hierarchies to justify bondage (Fredrickson, 2002).
Moral justification: Slavery was framed as beneficial to the enslaved themselves — “civilizing” them, providing structure, or even saving their souls through exposure to the “right” religion (Genovese, 1974).
Displacement of responsibility: Individual moral agency dissolved into collective practices — “I am just following tradition” or “Everyone owns slaves” became ready excuses.
These psychological mechanisms represent what psychologist Albert Bandura called “moral disengagement” — cognitive processes that allow ordinary people to participate in harmful practices without feeling morally compromised (Bandura, 1999).
Image created by author using DALL-E.
Voices of Resistance
Despite the overwhelming power of normalization, moral resistance to slavery existed throughout history. These voices of dissent reveal that even when atrocities become systemically embedded, human moral reasoning can transcend cultural conditioning.
The Quakers developed early antislavery positions in the 1700s, despite many initially enslaving people themselves. Their evolution toward abolitionism shows how moral frameworks can be questioned and reformed (Soderlund, 1985). In Japan’s Edo period, thinkers like Nakae Tōju criticized the practice of keeping servants as property, drawing on Confucian ethics to argue for human dignity (Paramore, 2016). And enslaved people themselves consistently resisted their bondage through countless acts of rebellion, escape, and community-building that challenged the system’s moral legitimacy (Camp, 2004).
These crosscurrents of moral resistance remind us that normalization was never complete and that the seeds of moral progress were always present, even if they required extraordinary courage to nurture.
Wealth as the Ultimate Justification
Throughout history, wealth has been the ultimate moral blindfold.
Slavery was not sustained by hatred alone — it was sustained by economics. Crops needed harvesting, empires needed building, and fortunes needed protecting. Every atrocity found its excuse in ‘necessity’ and ‘the economy’ (Baptist, 2014). This uncomfortable truth about the role of economic self-interest in perpetuating slavery should prompt us to critically reflect on the ways in which our own economic systems may be perpetuating similar injustices today.
That same logic persists today. How many injustices — sweatshops, migrant exploitation, mass incarceration — do we casually accept because challenging them might threaten profits, convenience, or national wealth?
The worship of the economy over human dignity is one of our oldest, most dangerous traditions.
The Suppression of Empathy
Perhaps most chilling is how societies managed the natural human capacity for empathy that might otherwise have disrupted the system. Evidence suggests humans possess innate empathic capabilities — yet slavery persisted for millennia.
The key insight is that empathy is not automatically universal; it is directed and shaped by social instruction. Children learn who deserves compassion and who does not. They absorb subtle and explicit messages about who belongs to the “circle of moral concern” (Singer, 1981).
Historical records reveal slaveholders who showed genuine affection for their families while remaining unmoved by the suffering of those they owned. This selective empathy was not a failure of emotional capacity but rather its deliberate redirection — a redirected capacity that served economic and social interests (Hochschild, 2016). This revelation should invoke a sense of moral outrage and the urgent need for empathy, challenging us to expand our ‘circle of moral concern’ to include all humanity.
Cross-Cultural Perspectives
Slavery’s normalization was not unique to Western societies. Looking at other cultural contexts reveals both similarities and important differences in how moral disengagement operates globally.
In the Ottoman Empire, slavery was justified through different frameworks than American chattel slavery. While still exploitative, Ottoman slavery typically lacked the extreme racial components of American slavery, instead functioning through religious and military justifications (Toledano, 1998). Enslaved people could sometimes achieve significant social mobility, creating a different psychological dynamic while maintaining human ownership’s fundamental injustice.
In ancient China, slavery became normalized through Confucian hierarchical principles rather than racial theories, with bondage often linked to punishment for criminal offenses or debt (Pulleyblank, 1958). This suggests that the psychological mechanism of moral justification can adapt to different cultural frameworks while achieving the same end: the normalization of human bondage.
These cross-cultural perspectives show that while justifications varied widely, the fundamental psychological processes of moral disengagement operated across diverse societies to make slavery seem natural and necessary.
Conditional Morality
It’s tempting to believe that moral instincts are hardwired — that we would naturally recognize injustice and recoil from it. But history suggests otherwise. Our sense of right and wrong is largely shaped by the social environments we inherit.
Had I been born into antebellum South Carolina, ancient Greece, or imperial Rome, odds are I would have absorbed the same brutal hierarchies as natural law. I would have rationalized them. Defended them. Benefited from them.
This realization isn’t an act of self-flagellation. It’s a necessary humility. Moral clarity isn’t a birthright; it’s an achievement — and a fragile one, constantly at risk of erosion by power, tradition, and convenience.
Modern Implications
The psychology that enabled slavery has not vanished; it has evolved. The exact mechanisms of moral disengagement operate today in different contexts:
- We maintain psychological distance from those who produce our consumer goods in exploitative conditions (Bales, 2012).
- We develop justifications for extreme inequality (“they should work harder”).
- We displace responsibility onto systems (“that is just how the economy works”).
Consider America’s mass incarceration system, which disproportionately affects Black Americans. As of 2023, the United States holds about 20% of the world’s incarcerated population despite making up just 4% of the global population — a grim figure that has barely shifted in over a decade (Prison Policy Initiative, 2023). This system operates through the exact psychological mechanisms that normalized slavery: the dehumanization of the “criminal,” displacement of responsibility onto “the justice system,” and moral justification that frames punishment as rehabilitative. The Thirteenth Amendment explicitly permits “involuntary servitude” as punishment for crime, creating a direct legal bridge between historical slavery and contemporary incarceration (Blackmon, 2008).
Source: Prison Policy Initiative (2024).
When prisoners earn pennies per hour for labor that benefits private corporations, we rationalize this as “teaching work ethic” or “offsetting incarceration costs” — moral justifications that obscure the exploitation at the system’s core. Our psychological distance from these realities — most Americans never visit prisons or know incarcerated people — allows us to accept conditions we would otherwise find intolerable.
The most sobering question is not why people accepted slavery then, but what atrocities we might be normalizing now, and whether future generations will look back at us with the same incomprehension with which we view slaveholders.
Even more uncomfortable: Under different circumstances, with different socialization, could I be conditioned to accept practices I now find reprehensible? The psychological evidence suggests a humbling answer: yes, probably (Haney et al., 1973).
This isn’t an exercise in historical judgment or self-congratulation. It’s an indictment of a value system that still places profit above people. Our capacity to justify cruelty in the name of economic success hasn’t vanished — it’s just evolved. Moral progress isn’t guaranteed — it requires confronting the quiet, comfortable ways we still trade lives for convenience and wealth. — it requires vigilance against our capacity for normalization and rationalization.
The real horror is not only that slavery once seemed acceptable; it’s that human psychology remains vulnerable to the same forces that made it so.
References
Alexander, M. (2010). The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. The New Press.
Aristotle. (1998). Politics (C.D.C. Reeve, Trans.). Hackett Publishing Company. (Original work published c. 350 BCE)
Bales, K. (2012). Disposable people: New slavery in the global economy. University of California Press.
Bandura, A. (1999). Moral disengagement in the perpetration of inhumanities. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 3(3), 193–209.
Baptist, E. E. (2014). The half has never been told: Slavery and the making of American capitalism. Basic Books.
Blackmon, D. A. (2008). Slavery by another name: The re-enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. Doubleday.
Camp, S. M. H. (2004). Closer to freedom: Enslaved women and everyday resistance in the plantation South. University of North Carolina Press.
Fredrickson, G. M. (2002). Racism: A short history. Princeton University Press.
Genovese, E. D. (1974). Roll, Jordan, roll: The world the slaves made. Vintage Books.
Haney, C., Banks, W. C., & Zimbardo, P. G. (1973). Interpersonal dynamics in a simulated prison. International Journal of Criminology and Penology, 1, 69–97.
Hochschild, A. R. (2016). Strangers in their own land: Anger and mourning on the American right. The New Press.
Paramore, K. (2016). Japanese Confucianism: A cultural history. Cambridge University Press.
Patterson, O. (1982). Slavery and social death: A comparative study. Harvard University Press.
Prison Policy Initiative. (2023). Mass incarceration: The whole pie 2023. Retrieved from
Pulleyblank, E. G. (1958). The origins and nature of chattel slavery in China. Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 1(2), 185–220.
Singer, P. (1981). The expanding circle: Ethics, evolution, and moral progress. Princeton University Press.
Soderlund, J. R. (1985). Quakers and slavery: A divided spirit. Princeton University Press.
Toledano, E. R. (1998). Slavery and abolition in the Ottoman Middle East. University of Washington Press.
Wiencek, H. (2012). Master of the mountain: Thomas Jefferson and his slaves. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
