People as property without rights. But it was considered something that could be done to anyone under the right circumstances, not an inherent biological state of subservience.
Replies
Iirc the distinguishing feature was not property without rights but that chattel slavery was hereditary. I don’t believe that was part of ancient forms
aug 18, 2025, 11:52 pm • 0 0 • view
Not true. Even Aristotle wrote that slaves were subhuman.
aug 18, 2025, 11:49 pm • 0 0 • view
The fact that he sees a problem here at all (how can one be a master and another a slave if they’re both responsive to reason and capable of fine action?) is your clue that he almost certainly doesn’t think of slaves as subhuman in the way modern slavers and racists sometimes did.
aug 19, 2025, 12:03 am • 1 0 • view
Charles Carroll’s “The Negro a Beast” is probably a useful contrast case
aug 19, 2025, 12:06 am • 1 0 • view
aug 19, 2025, 12:10 am • 1 0 • view
Popular 19th-century slaver ideology (and attendant racism) was by some distance more backward than Aristotle.
aug 19, 2025, 12:12 am • 1 0 • view
“Slave” was a social status rather than an inherent nature. If your ship got attacked by pirates you had a real good chance of being sold into slavery unless you were worth a random.
aug 19, 2025, 12:16 am • 0 0 • view
*ransom
aug 19, 2025, 12:17 am • 0 0 • view
You’re engaging in a very frustrating white supremacism strategy to minimize colonialism and slavery. Hopefully that’s unintentional
aug 18, 2025, 11:54 pm • 2 0 • view
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.
aug 19, 2025, 12:00 am • 0 0 • view
aug 19, 2025, 2:03 am • 0 0 • view
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.
aug 19, 2025, 2:07 am • 1 0 • view
aug 19, 2025, 2:07 am • 1 0 • view
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.
aug 19, 2025, 2:44 am • 0 0 • view
I have my doubts. One piece of evidence is Demosthenes’ “Aristogeiton”.
aug 19, 2025, 3:01 am • 0 0 • view
aug 19, 2025, 3:04 am • 0 0 • view
aug 19, 2025, 3:04 am • 0 0 • view
aug 19, 2025, 3:05 am • 0 0 • view
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.
aug 19, 2025, 12:09 am • 1 0 • view
It’s like you yourself can’t escape the modern notion that slavery requires an idea of racial inferiority.
aug 19, 2025, 12:09 am • 1 0 • view
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.
aug 19, 2025, 12:12 am • 1 0 • view
Pretty much everything you said was wrong. Congrats
aug 19, 2025, 12:02 am • 0 0 • view