It is indeed true that different people who belong to different cultures identify with moral codes that they think are good and serve them right. And this is the reason why according to all the world cultures, the definition of morality differs a great deal. Whereas slavery can be described as inhuman and that the rights of the slaves had been seriously trampled on, there are some sections of people who thought that this was the best thing to do, maximize on cheap labor and make huge profits out of it without necessarily thinking about how inhuman this was. This can be said about the cheap labor the Americas got in the 1800s. Even though the people of the South and the North held conflicting ideologies about this subject, more so about paid for and unpaid for labor, the truth of the matter is that the subject of cultural relativism has been rife for many centuries and therefore whether it was ethical or not, it just a matter of understanding both heir view points
But even so, one may wonder whether ethics really applied to the matter of slavery. The truth of the matter is, when ethics is defined away from slavery, it may be said to be referring to standards of determining whether something is right or wrong bearing in mind the fact that humans are supposed to abide by them in regard to what is beneficial to everyone in the society. This has to be fair and specific virtues have got to be upheld as an obligation by everyone. When the subject of slavery is put in this context, it becomes a matter of hard feelings and confusion (Norman 120). This is so because one cannot imagine of a situation where one group of people is totally ignorant of the hardships that another faced in their hands in the name of getting cheap labor from them. The slaves were feeling so bad having to work on the plantations without getting any pay or getting too little from the hard labor cannot be compared to the benefits that the plantation and industry owners were getting because it was as dehumanizing as it was ugly all together.
Ethical standards really matter a lot in every aspect of life. It does not really matter whether it is in an employment setting or relating with one another. Social norms and at times the laws of the land can greatly deviate from what is considered ethical (Rachels14). It may have been the norm back then that slaves offered cheap labor and therefore were to be taken in to facilitate industrialization. Upon examination of what really used to happen on the ground as normal work was going on, it apparently becomes a sad affair because there was a group of persons who were not getting fair treatment from the other. The conditions of were definitely not well founded but that was what was widely acceptable by society and because of that, it can be said that whatever was going on was ethical. If present day society was to judge what happened from our perspective today, then all that can be termed as unethical.
The American society was in all these divided into two, The Northern and Southern States. The North advocated for the industry but the slaves were to be paid but the South was for free slave labor. The opinion of the south was that the slaves were to be utilized and that they were not to be paid where as the North thought it wise to have them paid for the services they were offered. Either of the two thought that they were right in their own rights. The North may have thought that their deal was reasonable and well founded while the south thought that theirs was the best way to go. Subject to their own reasoning therefore, it is evident that each one of them had a right to do what they thought was good for the slaves. The moral beliefs and conduct that both The North and The South held were different all together (Rachels 33).
All in all, ethics is a subject that is very open ended and has different definitions to it. Back in the day when slavery was morally accepted by the American society, no one could dare accuse the other for ill treatment. When the social contract theory is put into this perspective, the governed in this case who are the slaves were not in agreement on anything whatsoever with the governor but even so, everything had to be done for the good of the industry. What happened was meant to gratify the self interest of the boss and the slave had to pay the price. The truth still remains that no single definition of ethics can justify what happened but by the mere fact that it happened then, as it was morally acceptable, it can be left at that because then, it was the right thing to do (Norman 68).
Works Cited
Norman, Richard. The Moral Philosophers: An Introduction to Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1998
Rachels, James. The Elements of Moral Philosophy. New York: McGraw Hill. 2007
