Aristotle was European. I’m arguing he (and almost everyone else born before about about 1900) was by modern definition racist and accepted subhuman categorization of the “other” as not immoral. And I’m saying that makes the word close to meaningless when applied historically.
Aristotle has to actually argue that some kinds of slavery are just because there is influential and plausible opinion known to him at the time that *no* slavery is just. He has contemporaries who think that enslaving even foreigners is just wrong.
Yes there are always the enlightened few, it’s true. But I’d guess Aristotle’s opinion was by far the mainstream in Greek opinion.
I have my doubts. One piece of evidence is Demosthenes’ “Aristogeiton”.
He had an affair with foreign woman resident in Athens; they fell out; he tried to get her sold into slavery. This is presented to the public as seriously shameful conduct—you can’t just sell a foreign woman into slavery, especially when she had been his benefactor. And if presented as shameful
it’s presumably because the speaker expects his audience to agree. I don’t think it’s safe to say they regarded foreigners as sub-human: in this case, it’s clear that trying to enslave a foreigner who had been a benefactor was the sort of conduct that called for censure.
I think respectable Athenian opinion would probably have been scandalised by the American slaveholder class’s selling its concubines and their children.
OF COURSE slaves themselves were dehumanized to greater or lesser degree, but the notion that that entire racial populations were in a natural state of slavery did not exist. These were cosmopolitan societies - especially Rome.
It’s like you yourself can’t escape the modern notion that slavery requires an idea of racial inferiority.
They didn’t have anything even resembling the modern idea of race, which was invented specifically to relegate entire populations to an inescapable and inherent inferior status to justify the most depraved exploitation.
Pretty much everything you said was wrong. Congrats