This chapter aims to present some of the highlights of the early modern debate about slavery. We will start by exploring theoretical debates about slavery by nature. As we will see, several authors view natural slavery as incompatible with widely held doctrines about human equality and natural liberty. Yet we will also see that many early modern authors are sympathetic to natural slavery—perhaps surprisingly so. Moreover, we will see that even in texts that are not explicitly (...) about transatlantic slavery, natural slavery is often tied to race. Next, we turn to theoretical debates about circumstantial slavery. We will see that most early modern authors accept at least some instances of this type of justification. It is only in the mid-eighteenth century that some prominent philosophers reject circumstantial slavery categorically, though there are earlier philosophers who argue against some forms of it while accepting others. Finally, we will examine the portion of the debate that is explicitly about transatlantic slavery. As one would expect, racial natural slavery plays a major role in this debate. What is surprising, however, is that race enters the debate earlier than one might think. As early as the 1680s, when theories of race were still in their infancy, critics of transatlantic slavery argue that racial bias fuels transatlantic slavery and that proponents of slavery view Black people as subhuman and as natural slaves. (shrink)

Discussions about the morality of slavery are a central part of the history of early modern philosophy. This book explores the philosophical ideas, theories, and arguments that occur in eighteenth-century debates about slavery, with a particular focus on the role that race plays in these debates. This exploration reveals how closely Blackness and slavery had come to be associated and how common it was to believe that Black people are natural slaves, or naturally destined for slavery. (...) The book examines not just well-known authors like David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but also less widely studied philosophers like Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, Lemuel Haynes, and Olympe de Gouges. By presenting philosophically important aspects of debates about slavery in eighteenth-century North America and Europe, the book aims to be a valuable resource for scholars, instructors, and students who are curious about a topic that historians of philosophy have so far neglected. (shrink)

The identification of contemporary forms of slavery is often problematically demarcated by reference to transatlantic enslavement as the definitive archetype. Such an approach overlooks other historic slaveries and neglects the totality of the maangamizi—the African holocaust. This article addresses the problematics of positioning the transatlantic system as the paradigm and unpacks the constituent elements of de jure slavery to construct an understanding of slavery as a condition as well as a status. By identifying the core (...) features of de jure chattel slavery through time, this paper displaces the assumption that legal status is determinative, giving meaning to the concept of slavery in the contemporary world. (shrink)

In the 1780s through the end of 1790s, Kant made various references to slavery (in its different forms) and the transatlantic slave trade in the context of his political philosophy or philosophy of right; he thereby had opportunities to speak in favor of abolitionism, which was gaining momentum in parts of Europe, or at least to articulate a normative critique of the race-based chattel slavery or Atlantic slavery and the associated slave trade qua (legalized) INSTITUTIONS; but (...) he did neither. Why? In raising and seeking an answer to this question, I am not interested in what Kant’s normative silence about the institutions of Atlantic slavery and slave trade may tell us about him as a person (for example, whether he was blinded by his own racist prejudices or whether he was affected by some kind of cognitive dissonance). Rather, I will focus on what it may tell us about certain limitations of his political philosophy, limitations that might have made it THEORETICALLY DIFFICULT for him to figure out exactly what to DO about those institutions as entrenched political realities. (shrink)

Slavery and Race: Philosophical Debates in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries explores philosophical ideas, theories, and arguments that are central to early modern discussions of slavery. Jorati explores a topic that is widely neglected by historians of philosophy: debates about the morality of slavery in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century America and Europe. Slavery and Race: Philosophical Debates in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries explores philosophical ideas, theories, and arguments that are central to early modern discussions of (...) class='Hi'>slavery. It is a companion volume to Jorati's Slavery and Race: Philosophy Debates in the Eighteenth Century (OUP 2023). (shrink)

This essay examines how two seventeenth-century feminists use the language of slavery and servitude to describe and protest the domination of women and girls. From their experiences of being forcibly confined to convents at a young age, Arcangela Tarabotti and Gabrielle Suchon demonstrate how the deprivation of knowledge, the restriction and destruction of social and kinship relations, and the impediments to the exercise their free wills impose upon them forms of slavery. The language of “slavery” and “servitude” (...) plays a distinctive role in their writing, the examination of which locates them in wider traditions of moral and political thought, helps us to understand their complaints, and allows us to appreciate their innovative, feminist adaptations of these discourses. The essay concludes with some reflections on how to think about the use of the idiom of slavery applied to the oppression of white Europeans, which is so common in the early modern period, contemporaneous with the rise of the transatlantic slave trade. (shrink)

During a period when transatlantic slavery was still being racialized, Hobbes and Leibniz represent stark alternatives on the nature and justification of slavery. This article investigates Leibniz’s encounter with the Hobbesian position on slavery (servitus), drawing out the racial implications. Throughout his political works, Hobbes defended voluntary servitude by transforming a legacy of Roman jurisprudence that had come to be encapsulated in the law of nations (jus gentium). Hobbes defended the justification that a master could possess (...) slaves as de jure property with the rights to buy or sell them. In Sur la notion commune de la justice, Leibniz argued against Hobbes that slave-owners’ rights should be limited. He also defended his own paternalistic justification of slavery, reinterpreting Aristotelian natural slavery. Leibniz claimed that some persons merit guidance as slaves by nature, yet legitimate possession of persons can only go as far as a usufruct. In contrast, Hobbes had rejected the normative logic that any person could rationally merit enslavement but maintained that masters could totally possess the body of captive slaves for as far as their power extends. (shrink)

When abolitionists Thomas Clarkson and Ottobah Cugoano published their essays on slavery in the late eighteenth century, they became key participants in one of the most important human rights campaigns in history. British abolitionism sought to expose the realities of transatlantic slavery in addition to asking politicians to help dehumanized Africans in the New World, and this edition brings together two major essays of the 1780s that were influential in the spread of the early abolitionist movement: Clarkson’s (...) _An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species_ and Cugoano’s _Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species_. A critical introduction and extensive historical appendices on British and American slavery and abolitionism, featuring contemporary arguments for and against slavery, are also included. (shrink)

Why was Anti-Slavery International (ASI) so effective at changing norms slavery and even mobilizing the support that ended the transatlantic slave trade at the end of the nineteenth century, and why has that success not continued on into subsequent eras? This article claims that ASI's organizational structure is the key to understanding why its accomplishments in earlier eras have yet to be replicated, and why today it struggles to make modern forms of slavery, such as human (...) trafficking, salient political issues. Organizational structure is defined by how an NGO distributes power over agenda-setting (proposal and enforcement power) and its implementation. Those NGOs that centralize agenda-setting and decentralize the implementation of that agenda will be most effective at changing international norms. This paper demonstrates the tractability of that claim with a comparative analysis of ASI past and present to show that changes in organizational structure have led to differences in their effect on international norms, in spite of the fact that slavery in its modern forms persists as a political and social problem. (shrink)

Despite the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, slavery is not confined to the past. Many forms of slavery exist worldwide today, as highlighted by increased recent awareness of trafficking. International, and some national, legislation to combat contemporary slavery and trafficking exists, yet these practices continue. As important as legislation is its effective and sensitive implementation. With trafficking, we need to recognise the complexities of forced labour within a global context and move policy beyond its current (...) restricted and potentially harmful focus on immigration. This includes providing support for those leaving forced labour and generating a thorough understanding of causal factors in order to reduce future vulnerability. (shrink)

This article uncovers a hitherto underappreciated aspect of transatlantic cultural history: Moravian late humanism, and its relationship to contemporary intellectual currents in the Americas and the broader Republic of Letters in the age of Benjamin Franklin. To date, the Moravians have attracted the attention of scholars for their novel theological views on gender and sexuality, their unique approach to reconciling piety with profit, their missionary efforts among native populations, their musical culture and their rejection of slavery. Their interactions (...) with the world of transatlantic and global late humanism, however, have not been studied in any systematic way. The present analysis opens and closes with a remarkable but almost unknown Latin oration, delivered in Philadelphia in 1742 by Nicolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf, to an audience provided with printed copies commissioned from the Franklin Press. A critical edition and an English translation of this work are provided in an appendix. In our article we examine the original European genesis and subsequent transatlantic context of Zinzendorf’s oration, tracing its development from a formal theological apologia into a quasi-legal statement of the count’s commitment to Moravian values, expressed in an erudite allusory language which left its listeners bemused. As our investigation shows, however, the confusion of the Philadelphia worthies who gathered to hear Zinzendorf ’s oration cannot be put down to a lack of cultural awareness among the leading missionaries and settlers from Germany and Denmark, many of whom partook fully in the contemporary culture of late humanism, both before and after they crossed the Atlantic. Through detailed reconstructions of their educations, correspondence networks, reading habits and note-taking practices, we show the richness of the Moravians’ transatlantic culture of late humanism, which ran the gamut from Ciceronian oratory to pious poetry in learned languages. Basing our argument on a little-known body of archival and printed sources in Latin, German, English and indigenous languages, we argue that Moravian late humanism had a significant impact on the development and expression of the Moravian church’s unique theology, its missionaries’ study of native languages and their interactions with other groups in the Atlantic world. In so doing, we also place the Moravians in the context of contemporary intellectual life in New England, the Caribbean, Europe and the Catholic world. (shrink)

Abstract:In this article I stage an encounter between Adriana Cavarero's account of uniqueness and Hortense Spillers's account of the flesh. Doing so is valuable for two reasons: First, it forces Cavarero's thought to consider not only the exclusion of women from the Western tradition, but also the anti-Blackness foundational to this tradition. This both expands and contorts Cavarero's thought, affirming her key claims while also altering them in the process. Second, reading Cavarero and Spillers together allows me to explore the (...) way forms of life that evade representation can be known. Both uniqueness and the flesh are evasive of representation; by reading them together—supplementing Cavarero's consideration of the embodied character of uniqueness with Spillers's distinction between body and flesh—I develop an account of apprehension that emphasizes touch as a way of knowing apart from representation. Apprehension takes seriously the ambivalence in Spillers's account of the flesh, whereby it is both revealed through violence as well as through practices of care, which, as Saidiya Hartman has made clear, are often in a proximate relation in the ongoing legacies of transatlantic slavery. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Catherine Malabou builds on neuroscience to offer a theory of the plasticity of the brain, arguing that trauma holds transformative potential. This article argues, however, that her theory prioritizes resilience in the face of episodic moments of violence and trauma, which undertheorizes the trauma of chronic conditions experienced by racialized, particularly Black, subjects. Instead, this article turns to Christina Sharpe’s theory of wake work and, more specifically, Black annotation and Black redaction, to demonstrate how, in the wake of (...) class='Hi'>transatlantic slavery, there is space for the collective disruption of symbolic structures to generate openings for imagining and circulating alternative possibilities to the hegemonic institutions of the past and present. Contrasting Malabou’s focus on the transformation of the brain during episodic violence and trauma, this article contends that Sharpe may demonstrate the possibility of plasticity in form and the symbolic in quotidian experiences and practices. (shrink)

The paper assesses current rising reparations claims for the Maafa/ Maangamizi from two angles. First, it explores the connectivity of reparations and global justice, peace and security. Second, it discusses how the claim is justified in international law. The concept of reparations in international law is also explored, revealing that reparations cannot be limited to financial compensation due to the nature of the damage and international law prescriptions. Comprehensive reparations based in international law require the removal of structures built on (...) centuries of illegal acts and aggression, in the forms of transatlantic slavery, colonialism and neo-colonialism. Reparations must also lead to the restitution of sovereignty to African and indigenous peoples globally. They are indispensable to halt the destruction of the earth as human habitat, caused by the violent European cultural, political, socio-economic system known as capitalism that is rooted in transatlantic slavery. (shrink)

This article responds to Raphael Sassower’s critique of my recent A Player’s Guide to the Post-Truth Condition. It addresses his concerns that I do not align myself sufficiently with Foucault and Critical Theory more generally. The article points out that notwithstanding my indebtedness to these sources, one cannot properly understand the post-truth condition without taking seriously the robust sense of freedom that today’s two dominant ideologies—Neoliberalism and Neo-Populism—presuppose in their various political-economic-social struggles. The article relates this point to several of (...) the key concepts underwriting my conception of post-truth, including Modal Power and the Symmetry Principle. The article ends with an account of the current “reparationist” discourse (i.e., repairing the intergenerational damage of transatlantic slavery) that makes it exemplary of the post-truth condition. (shrink)

The Holocaust serves as a foundational critical resource in postwar philosophy. Interventions into the logic of its exemplarity tend to treat exemplarity as a matter of archival selection that ignores earlier histories of genocide and slavery. A recent example is Alexander Weheliye’s critique of Giorgio Agamben, which seeks to restitute racial slavery as a theoretically significant moment of biological precarity. In a continuation of this logic, this essay introduces the history of Indian Ocean slavery, which precedes (...) class='Hi'>transatlantic slavery but is comparatively lesser known. In doing so, I suggest that complaints against archival selection do not go far enough, for they do not address the problem of a kind of event whose very nature is to destroy its own archive. Reading Jean-François Lyotard’s differend as a critique of the modern genre-supremacy of historiography, I argue that the very ground of historical examples demonstrates the regressive nature of exemplarity itself. (shrink)

The slave route from Africa to the Americas is as old as the contact between Europe and the New World itself, and the slave route across the Sahara is older still. Hence to describe the lives of ordinary people in western Africa during the era of slavery would require an examination of the whole of African history over the past five hundred years and more. And in Africa, as in Europe and the Americas, there was tremendous change over this (...) period and extensive variation at any point in time. Life in 1807, when Britain and the United States outlawed the slave trade, was considerably different than in 1492, when Columbus first sailed to the Caribbean. Hence to give an impression of how people in Africa lived during the era of transatlantic slavery is also to understand how the lives of people changed over the course of the slave trade. In 1492, a coup d’état brought a Muslim ruler, Askia Muhammad, to the throne of the great empire of Songhay, and for the next hundred years, Songhay ruled much of West Africa. As empires have always done, Songhay's influence extended to areas beyond its military control. At this time, the slavery of Africans in the Americas was in its infancy. Yet, in 1593, a military invasion from Morocco across the Sahara destroyed Songhay, and much of the internal cohesion of western Africa came to an end, precisely when transatlantic slavery emerged as the principal means of exploiting the agricultural and mineral wealth of the Americas. The lives of ordinary people changed because of this monumental collapse of Songhay. Similarly, the changes imposed by European abolition of the slave trade after 1807, although confusing and often delayed in their impact, were also monumental. Hence the first task in considering how people lived during the slavery era is to identify the differences over time that affected both people who were forced, through slavery, to cross the Atlantic and those who remained behind in Africa. Africa in 1492 or 1593 was not the same as in 1807, any more than Europe and America were. (shrink)

In his 1934 essay, “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,” Levinas raises important questions about the subject’s relation to nature and to history. His account of the ethical significance of paternity, maternity, and fraternity in texts such as Totality and Infinity and Otherwise Than Being suggest powerful new ways to understand the meaning of kinship, beyond the abstractions of Western liberalism. How does this analysis of race and kinship translate into the context of the Transatlantic slave trade, which not (...) only stole Africans from their families and communities, but also imposed upon them a single “fictive” kinship relation to the master? What if the problem of racialization is not only a matter of being “chained” to one’s identity through (presumed) blood ties, but also being violently separated from one’s kin? What does it mean for the concepts of ethical and political fraternity if the only father recognized by law and society as legitimate is the slave master? Or if the bodies of slave women are exploited, not only for productive labor, but also for the reproductive labor that makes more slaves for the master? If kinship is a way of making sense of the relation between past, present and future generations, then what does a radical disruption of existing kinship relations, and the imposition of one fictive, absolute and unilateral kinship relation, do to the social meaning of time and of history in a particular community? In this paper, I reflect on the significance of fecundity and kinship in the context of US slavery, both in order in order to situate my analysis in the particular history of my own present community, and as a way of demonstrating the significance of a more determinate social analysis for Levinas’ ethics of singularity and politics of universal justice. (shrink)

Liberia’s protracted civil conflict was sustained for a period of fourteen years, killing approximately 250,000 Liberians and displacing half of the population. Liberia’s war, like othe...

By recovering the dependent, often enslaved, laborers who helped to make European medicines commercially available in the New England colonies, this article offers a new history of early American pharmaceutical knowledge and production. It does so by considering the life and labor of an unnamed, enslaved assistant who was said to make tinctures, elixirs, and other common remedies in a 1758 letter between two business partners, Silvester Gardiner, a successful surgeon and apothecary in Boston, Massachusetts, and William Jepson, his former (...) apprentice, in Hartford, Connecticut. Using strategies from slavery and critical archive studies, as well as from social history and the history of medicine, this article emphasizes the materiality and embodiment of pharmaceutical production and follows fragmentary evidence beyond the business archive to reverse the systemic erasure of enslaved and indentured laborers from the records of eighteenth-century manufacturers of medicines. The medicine trades of men like Gardiner and Jepson appear more reliant upon dependent laborers – named and unnamed – who not only performed rote tasks but brought their experience and judgment to their labors as well. Their contributions could be obviously medical (preparing remedies) or more ambiguous (stoking fires, shipping goods), but these actions together constituted early modern pharmacy, enabled the expansion of the transatlantic medicine trade, and laid the foundations for the more self-sufficient and industrialized pharmacy that developed in the nineteenth century. Centering the skill and knowledge among subordinated laborers in one facet of an emergent transatlantic care economy affirms the entanglement of slavery and science and underscores the necessity of asking new questions of old sources. (shrink)

“Racial capitalism” has surfaced during the past few decades in projects that highlight the production of difference in tandem with the production of capital—usually through violence. Scholars in this tradition typically draw their inspiration—and framework—from Cedric Robinson’s influential 1983 text, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. This article uses the work of Orlando Patterson to highlight some limits of “racial capitalism” as a theoretical project. First, the “racial capitalism” literature rarely clarifies what scholars mean by “race” or (...) “capitalism.” Second, some scholars using this conceptual language treat black subjectivity as a debilitated condition. An alleged byproduct of the Transatlantic slave trade, this debilitated form of black subjectivity derives from an African American exceptionalism that treats slavery as a form of abject status particular to capitalism without providing adequate theoretical justification or historical explanation. By contrast, we demonstrate how Patterson’s insights about property, status, and capital offer an analysis of slavery more attentive to race, gender, sexuality, age, and ability. We close by using the “forensics of capital” to explore the notions of causality and protocols for determining who owes what to whom implicit in Patterson’s concept of “social death.”. (shrink)

Like Hegel, Marx and Engels, Nietzsche has made the Haitian Revolution “unthinkable” (Michel-Rolph Trouillot). He provokes his readers by justifying slavery in the ancient and in the modern world. In order to indicate the problematic dimension of Nietzsche’s cultural legitimation of slavery it is necessary to situate his ideas in the context of the transatlantic slave trade. Furthermore, we need to ask whether his anti-democratic statements regarding the French Revolution could be understood as a “hyper-democratic” commitment to (...) a “coming democracy” (Jacques Derrida) that resists slavery. I raise the question whether Nietzsche, in this context, considers the possibility of overcoming the institution of slavery in modern Europe. (shrink)

This commentary focuses upon the ‘fetishism of persons’ in Marx which Balibar claims both mirrors and animates the better-known fetishism of things. Revisiting the chapter on exchange in which Balibar grounds his thesis, the essay attends to the theatrical metaphors by which Marx presents legal personhood as a pantomime of commodity fetishism. The essay demonstrates how the movable immobility of the commodity comes to life in its inverse, the mobile and immovable figure of the legal person; it then claims that (...) this inversion positions legal persons as animate props for property. But if legal persons, the essay asks, merely personify economic relations, by what means are they sufficiently distanced from commodities to be able to become their reflex and puppet? In other words, what vestibule keeps personal liberty’s analogy with economic relations from collapsing into identity? A significant historical answer, the essay asserts, is transatlantic chattel slavery—not only because this institution is both ideological foil to, and material basis for, liberal capital, but also because the slave herself, as animate property, undoes the distinction between persons and commodities. The essay concludes by insisting upon the significance of this neglected figure in philosophies of the transindividual, while also taking first steps toward a transindividual analysis of slavery. (shrink)

What was distinctive about the evil of the transatlantic slave trade and New World slavery? In what ways can the present seek to rectify such historical wrongs, even while recognizing that they lie beyond repair? Irreparable Evil explores the legacy of slavery and its moral and political implications, offering a nuanced intervention into debates over reparations. David Scott reconsiders the story of New World slavery in a series of interconnected essays that focus on Jamaica and the (...) Anglophone Caribbean. Slavery, he emphasizes, involved not only scarcely imaginable brutality on a mass scale but also the irreversible devastation of the ways of life and cultural worlds from which enslaved people were uprooted. Colonial extraction shaped modern capitalism; plantation slavery enriched colonial metropoles and simultaneously impoverished their peripheries. To account for this atrocity, Scott examines moral and reparatory modes of history and criticism, probing different conceptions of evil. He reflects on the paradoxes of seeking redress for the specific moral evil of slavery, criticizing the limitations of liberal rights-based arguments for reparations that pursue reconciliation with the past. Instead, this book argues, in making the urgent demand for reparations, we must acknowledge the fundamental irreparability of a wrong of such magnitude. (shrink)

In this methods-building article, I show how attention to long-term continuities in female enslavement patterns helps us understand the emergence of the Black Atlantic. Slavery, I argue, is one form of human parasitism. I extend Orlando Patterson’s theory of human parasitism to examine the phenomenon of parasitic intertwining, wherein the forced labor of women became integral to broader social projects including household functioning, elite status maintenance, and population expansion. The thousand-year period between the fall of Rome and the rise (...) of the transatlantic slave trade was once described as a rupture in European slavery, with serfdom gradually supplanting slavery. The mass capture, transport, and enslavement of women, however, continued even as male slaves and ex-slaves gained significant status changes. The entrenchment of women in zonal slave trades generated both a potent cultural logic and a structural blueprint for the transatlantic trade. (shrink)

The enslavement of Africans did strike the young, hopeful and radical Romantic poets of nineteenth-century England as the most blatant example of human oppression and the clearest example of humans being deprived of liberty. Although their poetry refers to and draws on the imagery of African slavery, the major poetic figures of the Romantic Movement in England rarely spoke directly against the slave trade and colonial slavery. Thus the issue of slavery, the transatlantic trade, and Britain's (...) role in it, though well established in the nineteenth-century historical context, remained a subject only partially explored by the English Romantic poets, who were, at the time, more preoccupied with British domestic policy and the enslavement of their own nation. (shrink)

It has become commonplace within feminist theory to claim that women’s lives are constructed by multiple, intersecting systems of oppression. In this thesis, I challenge the consensus that oppression is aptly captured by the theoretical model of “intersectionality.” While intersectionality originates in Black feminist thought as a purposive intervention into US antidiscrimination law, it has been detached from that context and harnessed to different representational aims. For instance, it is often asserted that intersectionality enables a representational politics that overcomes legacies (...) of exclusion within hegemonic Anglo-American feminism. I argue that intersectionality reinscribes the political exclusion of racialized women as a feature of their embodied identities. That is, it locates the failure of political representation in the “complex” identities of “intersectional” subjects, who are constructed as unrepresentable in terms of “race” or “gender” alone. Further, I argue that intersectionality fails to supplant race- and class-privileged women as the normative subjects of feminist theory and politics. In Chapter One, I demonstrate that intersectionality illicitly imports unitary concepts of “race,” “gender,” and “class.” In Chapter Two, I argue that intersectionality lacks a theory of hierarchy: it is a “flat geography” which cannot capture vertical and horizontal lines of power. In Chapter Three, I explore the role of analogical reasoning in rendering racialized women invisible both as gendered and as racialized subjects in twentieth-century social movements. To concretize this argument, I turn to Simone de Beauvoir’s use of race-sex analogies to describe (white, bourgeois) “women’s” situation in The Second Sex. In Chapter Four, I advance a programmatic unified account of oppression. I suggest that the possibility of a unified theory (as opposed to an intersectional one) is intimated in the concrete articulation of race, class, and gender. My point of departure is a phenomenology of capitalism, which reveals that these are all fundamentally modes of exploitation and appropriation. In Chapter Five, I theorize how they are made visible (and invisible) on the body. I extend Frantz Fanon’s account of “epidermalization,” drawing upon the marxian concepts of “fetishism” and “mode of appearance” to elaborate four structures of gendered racialized perception: first, the “miscegenation taboo” structures perceptions of the “purity” of whiteness and the “polluting” effects of blackness. Whiteness, theorised as a “possessive investment” and as “property” is defined by the right to exclude. Second, the “episteme of tellable differences” produces the conviction that we can automatically “tell the difference” between a body placed in one “racial” or gender category, and another—while bodies that temporarily confound classification cause fear and consternation. Third, the “race/reproduction bind” names the axiomatic assumption that “race” is reproduced through (heterosexual) procreation and that “race” is, therefore, biologically inheritable. Finally, the “fear/criminalisation reflex” refers to the bidirectional equation of particular racialised-gendered bodies with crime, and of crime with those bodies; this a function of the discursive use of ‘crime’ as an alibi for “race’” the systemic racialisation of punitive carceral institutions, and the historical origins of “race” in transatlantic chattel slavery, which shaped perceptual-cognitive associations of freedom with whiteness and captivity with blackness. (shrink)

Christian ethical practice has historically fallen short, when we consider the histories of European colonial violence from the sixteenth century and the transatlantic slave trade in Africans. Today, Christian ethics can fail to uphold a standard of resistance to contemporary evils, including racial injustice. To what extent can Christian ethics break with this history and be saved? This article considers the ongoing colonial tendencies of Christian ethics and theological education in Britain, before considering the centrality of decolonisation, primarily ‘of (...) the mind’. In the latter part, it turns to examples of anti-colonial Christian ethics, in the work of Robert Beckford, Anthony Reddie, Anupama Ranawana and Anderson Jeremiah. It ends by giving attention to what decolonisation might mean in religious and theological education, as we seek to create spaces for learning in which all people's bodies, minds and voices are welcomed and honoured. (shrink)

The starting point of this essay is the logical and political objection that Plato made against poetry, as well as the lack of distinction that he specified as the origin of its dangerousness, and which modernity converted into the condition of possibility of certain egalitarian forms of sensible experience and material life. I will then look at the function that the historical rearticulation of Platonic idealism has fulfilled from Romanticism to the present day in the age-old dispute between philosophy and (...) poetry, paying particular attention to the different readings of Hölderlin and Mallarmé carried out by Benjamin, Lacoue-Labarthe, and Agamben as symbols of the disfiguration of poetry. I will analyze the tension between sense and sound as the founder of an irreducible territory that opens a potentiality indicative of its political force. Lastly, I will turn to Michel Foucault’s The Government of Self and Others to analyze the function of messianism and parrhesia in the contemporary characterization of political poetry and its conflicts with the truth-telling of philosophy. (shrink)

“Modern slavery,” a term used to describe severe forms of labor exploitation, is beginning to spark growing interest within business and society research. As a novel phenomenon, it offers potential for innovative theoretical and empirical pathways to a range of business and management research questions. And yet, development into what we might call a “field” of modern slavery research in business and management remains significantly, and disappointingly, underdeveloped. To explore this, we elaborate on the developments to date, the (...) potential drawbacks, and the possible future deviations that might evolve within six subdisciplinary areas of business and management. We also examine the value that nonmanagement disciplines can bring to research on modern slavery and business, examining the connections, critiques, and catalysts evident in research from political science, law, and history. These, we suggest, offer significant potential for building toward a more substantial subfield of research. (shrink)

Codes of ethics were drafted by participants in the European and North American Congresses of DIYbio, a single global organization of informal biotechnology practitioners, in 2011. In general, the existence of a code of ethics amongst a community is itself significant. Codes of professional ethics are common in scientific and engineering fields, as well as in DIY communities. It is also significant, and highly unusual, that DIYbio has maintained two separate codes of ethics years after their drafting. While agreement was (...) reached within the congress for each geographic region, with considerable commonality between the two codes drafted, they are far from identical. There are differences in the ordering of items, the wording of common items, and the presence/absence of items. I will argue that these differences are meaningful, and consider them with respect to cultural variation, ethics, and societal implications. Finally, I recommend that the entire DIYbio organization unite under a single code of ethics, and that one of the existing drafts is superior to the other for this purpose. (shrink)

The Business Ethics Center of the Budapest University of Economic Sciences organized a Transatlantic Business Ethics Summit on September 15–17, 2000 in Budapest, Hungary. The Summit was sponsored by the Community of European Management Schools and Procter & Gamble.The main function of the Summit was to provide a forum for leading American and European scholars to explore the background theories and value bases of business ethics from the perspective of the 21st century. The participants reflected on the state of (...) the art of business ethics as it has been practised in the USA and Europe; however, the future of business ethics as a discipline was the main focus of the Summit. Since business ethics is closely related to business and capitalism, some considerations of the 21st century economic, political, and social reality were presented too. The paper is based on and composed from the abstracts provided by the participants of the Transatlantic Business Ethics Summit. The abstract booklet can be obtained from Laszlo Zsolnai, the Convenor of the Summit. (shrink)

The slavery contract is not a rights violation since the right not to be enslaved and the right not to give out a benefit are waivable and the conjunction of their voluntary waiver is not itself a rights violation. The case for the contract being pejoratively exploitative is not clear. Hence given the general presumption in favor of liberty of contract, such a transaction ought to be permitted. The contract is also not invalid on the grounds that the wrongdoer’s (...) consent to it necessarily reflects involuntariness or irrationality or on the grounds that it is logically impossible for the wrongdoer to satisfy the contract. Allowing such contracts may not have desirable consequences, but for the liberal this by itself is not a sufficient reason against allowing them. One case where the slavery contract might be relevant is where a victim’s agent or the state agrees to waive its claim to harsh punishment in return for the offender agreeing to be enslaved. (shrink)

The Second World War offered an excellent opportunity for some U.S. think tanks to influence foreign-policy-making processes and get involved in transatlantic diplomacy. This study seeks to demonstrate that the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) challenged the stalemate between the U.S. and French authorities by gathering together U.S. experts and non-collaborationist French leaders. A first-hand reconstruction of this informal network is based on the unreleased Peace Aims Group’s records. This was a unique CFR exchange programme for European governments-in-exile’s representatives. (...) In the first part, a general reconstruction of Council on Foreign Relations’ planning introduces an original assessment of the meetings with some prominent French intellectuals and politicians. It is argued that these conferences can be interpreted as rare examples of wartime public diplomacy. The second part discloses new historical evidence demonstrating the participation of Jean Monnet in a Peace Aims session. This discovery proves the existence of a long-term partnership between one of the key protagonists of the European integration process and the most authoritative foreign-policy think tank working for the Roosevelt administration. Overall, the analysis of Peace Aims Group’s off-the-record discussions sheds new light on the WWII transatlantic debate on postwar Europe and France. (shrink)

Slavery has long stood as a mirror image to the conception of a free person in republican theory. This essay contends that slavery deserves this central status in a theory of freedom, but a more thorough examination of slavery in theory and in practice will reveal additional insights about freedom previously unacknowledged by republicans. Slavery combines imperium and dominium in a way that both destroys freedom today and diminishes opportunities to achieve freedom tomorrow. Dominium and imperium (...) working together are a greater affront to freedom than either working alone. However, an examination of slavery in practice, focusing on the experiences of American slaves, demonstrates that republicanisms’ acknowledged strategies for freedom-seeking, acquiring insulation from domination through law and through norms, do not encompass the full range of options. Slaves also seek freedom through physical absence, economic activity, and culture. The account of slavery and freedom developed here suggests republican accounts of freedom should either give up their focus on thresholds of freedom, or consider the possibility of a plural conception of freedom that extends beyond just freedom as non-domination to include freedom as collective world-making, or both. (shrink)

The permissibility of actions depends upon facts about the flourishing and separateness of persons. Persons differ from other creatures in having the task of discovering for themselves, by conjecture and refutation, what sort of life will fulfil them. Compulsory slavery impermissibly prevents some persons from pursuing this task. However, many people may conjecture that they are natural slaves. Some of these conjectures may turn out to be correct. In consequence, voluntary slavery, in which one person welcomes the duty (...) to fulfil all the commands of another, is permissible. Life-long voluntary slavery contracts are impermissible because of human fallibility; but fixed-term slavery contracts should be legally enforceable. Each person has the temporarily alienable moral right to direct her own life. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to problematise a particular social transparency and disclosure regulation in the UK, that transcend national boundaries in order to control slavery in supply chains operating in the developing world. Drawing on notions from the regulatory and sociology literature, i.e. transparency and normativity, and by interviewing anti-slavery activists and experts, this study explores the limitations of the disclosure and transparency requirements of the UK Modern Slavery Act and, more specifically, how anti-slavery (...) activists experience and interpret the new regulations and the regulators’ implementation of the regulation. This research found limited confidence among anti-slavery activists regarding the Act’s call for transparency in relation to the elimination of slavery from global supply chains. The research also found that the limits of the transparency provisions within the Act appear to hinder the attainment of normativity. This study provides new and unique insights into the critical role that social activists play in exposing the lack of corporate transparency and failures of responsibility to protect workers within global supply chains. (shrink)

The Business Ethics Center of the Budapest University of Economic Sciences organized a Transatlantic Business Ethics Summit on September 15–17, 2000 in Budapest, Hungary. The Summit was sponsored by the Community of European Management Schools (CEMS) and Procter & Gamble. The main function of the Summit was to provide a forum for leading American and European scholars to explore the background theories and value bases of business ethics from the perspective of the 21st century. The participants reflected on the (...) state of the art of business ethics as it has been practised in the USA and Europe; however, the future of business ethics as a discipline was the main focus of the Summit. Since business ethics is closely related to business and capitalism, some considerations of the 21st century economic, political, and social reality were presented too. The paper is based on and composed from the abstracts provided by the participants of the Transatlantic Business Ethics Summit. The abstract booklet can be obtained from Laszlo Zsolnai, the Convenor of the Summit. (shrink)

Several bioethical topics received a great deal of news coverage here in Scotland in 2009. Three important issues with transatlantic connections are the swine flu outbreak, which was handled very differently in Scotland, England and America; the US debate over healthcare reform, which drew the British NHS into the controversy; and the release to Libya of the Lockerbie bomber, which at first glance might not seem particularly bioethical, but which actually hinged on the very public discussion of the prisoner’s (...) medical records. On a national level, there have been attempts in both Scotland and England to change the law on assisted suicide, where success looks more likely than ever. This paper will discuss each of these issues, and hopefully raise awareness of how these issues were dealt with in the UK and its component countries. (shrink)

This paper argues that Aristotle challenges the view of Athenian democrats that all rule is master rule – the imposition of the will of the powerful on the powerless – by arguing that the politeuma, or government, should be identical with the politeia, understood both as the constitution and the collectivity of citizens. I examine Aristotle’s analysis and response to democrats’ skepticism of the law that the constitution embodies. Aristotle argues that democrats think law limits license even when the source (...) of law is the people themselves. The view of citizens as the source of law coupled with the view of the law as a commitment to collective determinations regarding the end makes law salvation rather than slavery. (shrink)

According to an oft-repeated narrative, while Kant maintained racist views through the 1780s, he changed his mind in the 1790s. Pauline Kleingeld introduced this narrative based on passages from Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals and “Toward Perpetual Peace”. On her reading, Kant categorically condemned chattel slavery in those texts, which meant that he became more racially egalitarian. But the passages involving slavery, once contextualized, either do not concern modern, race-based chattel slavery or at best suggest that Kant mentioned (...) it as a cautionary tale for labor practices in Europe. Overall, Kant never explicitly considered chattel slavery as a moral problem to be addressed on its own. Rather, he treated it primarily in terms of its function in human history. If he ended up expressing some qualms about its practices, it was likely because they threatened to deepen intra-European conflicts and undermine the prospect of perpetual peace. The humanity of the enslaved “Negroes” was never part of the reasoning. This was not a casual oversight on Kant’s part. It reflects the complexity of his philosophical system: everything he did or did not say about chattel slavery begins to make sense once we connect his philosophy of history and his depiction of “Negroes” as natural slaves. (shrink)

In spite of some revisionist attempts to rationalise slavery as just another form of trade between interested parties, there is an overwhelming conviction that it represented an age of man’s highest inhumanity to fellow man. Accordingly, calls have been loud and persistent as to the need for reparation which though will never compensate for actual loss, nevertheless has the possibility of symbolising penitence and serve as cushion for some of the debilitating damages done. This paper examines the moral basis (...) of the call for reparation. In agreeing with the moral validity of the claims, the paper probes further in a realistic manner and argue that African states in their present situation cannot make a serious case for reparation. The paper argues further that for African states to position themselves for genuine reparation struggles in this age of political realism, urgent steps must be taken to ensure the useful and productive deployment of available resources in Africa and remove the continent from its appendage status with the west. The paper concludes that only when African states are able to break the cycle of poverty and underdevelopment, freeing themselves from external manipulations can a credible and rewarding case for reparation be made. Keywords : Reparation, Slavery, Realism, Africa, Leadership. (shrink)

My goal in this paper is to shed light on how moral progress actually occurs. I begin by restating a conception of moral progress that I set out in previous work, the “Naïve Conception,” and explain how it comports with various normative and metaethical views. I go on to develop an index of moral progress and show how judgments about moral progress can be made. I then discuss an example of moral progress from the past—the British abolition of the Atlantic (...) slave trade—with a view to what can be learned from this for a contemporary struggle for moral progress: the movement to decarbonize the global economy. I close with some thoughts about how moral progress actually occurs. (shrink)

What should we do with statues and place‐names memorializing people who committed human‐rights abuses linked to slavery and postslavery racism? In this article, I draw on UN principles of transitional justice to address this question. I propose that a successful approach should meet principles of transitional justice recognized by the United Nations, including affirming rights to justice, truth, reparations, and guarantees of nonrecurrence of human rights violations. I discuss four strategies for handling contested heritage, examining strengths and weaknesses of (...) each strategy. Examples from Bristol, England, highlight common challenges and positive lessons. (shrink)

This paper examines the ethics of the Australian business community’s responses to the phenomenon of modern slavery. Engaging a critical discourse approach, we draw upon a data set of submissions by businesses and business representatives to the Australian government’s Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade ‘Parliamentary Inquiry into Establishing a Modern Slavery Act in Australia’—which preceded the signing into law of Australia’s Modern Slavery Act 2018—to examine the business community’s discursive construction in their submissions (...) of the ethical–political concept of freedom. The paper shows how the concept of freedom was employed by Australian business in a manner that privileged their own subject status and advocated for legislation with minimal burden. Relating this contemporary case to a longer historical context, we show how Australian business responses towards modern slavery map onto liberal and neoliberal ethics in which the freedom of the propertied takes precedent over that of the property-less. Further, we show discursive similarities in the arguments presented by modern Australian businesses and certain historical efforts by members of the business community to privilege commercial freedoms in responses to 18th and 19th Century abolitionist movements. Overall, our research makes two important contributions: first, it highlights the value of a critical discourse lens in business ethics research to show how business and other stakeholders in the field construct and shape their own and other’s ethically-laden understanding of reality; and second, it presents a case for considerable scepticism about the motivation of business to employ the freedoms made available to it under neo/liberal discourse to confront a key human rights challenge. (shrink)

This paper argues that Aristotle challenges the view of Athenian democrats that all rule is master rule – the imposition of the will of the powerful on the powerless – by arguing that the politeuma, or government, should be identical with the politeia, understood both as the constitution and the collectivity of citizens. I examine Aristotle’s analysis and response to democrats’ skepticism of the law that the constitution embodies. Aristotle argues that democrats think law limits license even when the source (...) of law is the people themselves. The view of citizens as the source of law coupled with the view of the law as a commitment to collective determinations regarding the end makes law salvation rather than slavery. (shrink)