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===The Moral Argument===
[[File:Slaveshipposter.jpg|thumbnail|left|Stowage of the British slave ship Brookes under the regulated slave trade act of 1788]]
The evolution of the moral argument dates back to the long conversation around the question of human nature. What Sylvia Wynter and others frame as the “genre of the human” provides a roadmap to the nature of the conceptual arguments advanced by Western philosophers. Clearly, who gets constituted as human determines who is offered the protections offered by a social contract that confers rights upon those humans that belong to a particular society. The foundations of enslavement, then, are based upon the denial of the humanity of those that are enslaved. Importantly, this precedes the enslavement of Africans, but it is also true that it was already racialized, if we take the arguments of Cedric Robinson to heart.
The basic assumptions of those articulating moral rationales for ending enslavement in the nineteenth century had to revolve around claims of the humanity of those enslaved. Using a variety of Biblical readings, abolitionists in England, for example built an argument that enslaved people shared the basic humanity as those of English descent.