In my model and priors, the racist NA slave-owners are much less likely to do certain categories of negative things, and are actually on the higher end of the nice-slavery scale on account of them usually being too disgusted or other-negative-feelings to bother doing anything to them but the occasional light no-contact beating and lots of forced labor.
It's hard to get estimates for beatings - there appears to have been a great deal of variation - but let's just say that racism is unlikely to decrease beatings. And American slaves were definitely raped. A lot. Sometimes because they were considered inferior - after all, if the kid is half white, they'll make a better slave, right?
Roman slaves are the ones I know most about. And while they had essentially no rights, there was no concept of them being inherently inferior - they simply had lost their freedom, whether selling it to cover debts or having it taken as spoils of war. They could not be identified visually, and if freed were the equal of any Roman. Roman slaves gradually acquired more rights as time went on.
The master's power over the slave was called (dominica potestas), and it was absolute. Torture, degradation, unwarranted punishment, and even killing a slave when he was old or sick, in the eyes of the law, slaves were property who could not legally hold property, make contracts, or marry, and could testify in court only under torture. The death of his master did not free a slave. Under the Empire laws were passed stating that a slave could not be sold to fight wild beasts in the amphitheater; he could not be put to death by his master simply because he was old or ill; if her were 'exposed', or turned out on the streets to die, his was freed by the act; and he could not be killed without due process of law. But these laws were generally disregarded, and only the influence of Christianity changed the condition of slaves for the better.
Romans were not a kindly people, but they did not often forget that a slave was valuable property. Much depended on the individual master. Vedius Pollio, notorious for cruelty, once ordered a slave to be thrown alive into a pond as food for the fish because he had broken a goblet. But Cicero had great affection of his slave Tiro. The Elder Cato tells us something about the treatment of farm slaves. He held that slaves should always be at work except for the hours - few enough at best - allowed them for sleep. Slaves were not well fed, but it must be remembered that the diet suggested by Cato (grain, fallen olives or salf fish and sour wine) was very similar to that of the poor Romans. A slave received a tunic every year and a cloak and pair of wooden shoes every two years. Worn-out clothing was returned to the slave manager to be made into patchwork quilts.
If a slave escaped, he had to live the life of an outlaw, with organized bands of slave hunters on his track. A fugitive slave was a criminal, for he had stolen himself. If he was caught, he was branded on the forehead with the letter F, for fugitivus, and sometimes he had a metal collar riveted around his neck. One of these collars, preserved at Rome, says in Latin, "I have run away. Catch me. If you take me back to my master Zoninus, you'll be rewarded".
A slave could not legally own property, but he often had peculium, unofficial possessions. Often an industrious, thrifty slave could scrape together a little fund of his own if his master permitted it. City slaves had more chance to do this, collecting tips from his master's friends and guests or receiving presents from students if he was a teacher. Sometimes a master would allow a slave to have a trade and keep part of the earnings. A thrifty slave's ultimate goal was to buy his freedom. Sometimes a slave would buy his own slave to hire out. A slave of a slave was called a vicarius. A slave's property went to his master upon the slave's death.
Slaves were often punished. The most common one for neglect of duty or petty misconduct was a beating or a flogging with a lash (called a flagrum or a flagellum). Sometimes slaves were punished by having to wear a heavy forked log around his shoulders with his neck in the fork and his arms fastened to the ends projecting in front. This is where the term of abuse furcifer came from. Minor punishments were inflicted at the order of the master or his manager by a fellow slave, called for the time carnifex(executioner). Occasionally a slave would be assigned to harder labour than he was accustomed to. Utterly incorrigible slaves were sold to be gladiators. Punishments were severe for actual crimes, always a possibility since slaves were so numerous and had such free access to their master. Nothing was so much dreaded throughout all Italy as an uprising of slaves. For an attempt on a master's life or for taking part in an insurrection, the penalty was death for the criminal and his family in a most agonizing form - crucifixion. Pompey erected six thousand crosses along the road to Rome, each bearing a survivor of the final battle in which their leader, Spartacus, fell. The word crux (cross) was used amoung slaves as a curse, especially in the expression [I] ad [malam] crucem ([Go] to the [bad] cross).
A slave might buy his freedom, or he might be freed as a reward for faithful service or some special act of devotion. A formal act of manumission often took place before or praetor, but it was only necessary for his master to declare him free before witnesses. A new-made freedman set on his head the cap of liberty. A freedman was called libertus as an individual or in reference to his master, and libertinus as one of a class. His former master became his patron. [source]
Some links:
http://www.thetalkingdrum.com/wil.html http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USASpunishments.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treatment_of_slaves_in_the_United_States#Punishment_and_abuse http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugitive_slave
Roman slaves: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_ancient_Rome http://www.roman-colosseum.info/roman-life/slave-punishment.htm http://www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/LX/SlavesRomanEmpire.html
Much thanks for all the extra data! That was some interesting reading.
A comment by Anonymous on Three Worlds Collide:
Robin has similar qualms:
I replied that I had taken considerable pains to set out the explicit arguments before daring to publish the story. And moreover, I had gone to considerable length to present the Superhappy argument in the best possible light. (The opposing viewpoint is the counterpart of the villain; you want it to look as reasonable as possible for purposes of dramatic conflict, the same principle whereby Frodo confronts the Dark Lord Sauron rather than a cockroach.)
Robin didn't find this convincing:
I think that this understates the power and utility of fiction. I once read a book that was called something like "How to Read" (no, not "How to Read a Book") which said that nonfiction was about communicating knowledge, while fiction was about communicating experience.
If I want to communicate something about the experience of being a rationalist, I can best do it by writing a short story with a rationalist character. Not only would identical abstract statements about proper responses have less impact, they wouldn't even communicate the same thought.
From The Failures of Eld Science:
"...Work expands to fill the time allotted, as the saying goes. But people can think important thoughts in far less than thirty years, if they expect speed of themselves." Jeffreyssai suddenly slammed down a hand on the arm of Brennan's chair. "How long do you have to dodge a thrown knife?"
"Very little time, sensei!"
"Less than a second! Two opponents are attacking you! How long do you have to guess who's more dangerous?"
"Less than a second, sensei!"
"The two opponents have split up and are attacking two of your girlfriends! How long do you have to decide which one you truly love?"
"Less than a second, sensei!"
"A new argument shows your precious theory is flawed! How long does it take you to change your mind?"
"Less than a second, sensei!"
"WRONG! DON'T GIVE ME THE WRONG ANSWER JUST BECAUSE IT FITS A CONVENIENT PATTERN AND I SEEM TO EXPECT IT OF YOU! How long does it really take, Brennan?"
Sweat was forming on Brennan's back, but he stopped and actually thought about it -
"ANSWER, BRENNAN!"
"No sensei! I'm not finished thinking sensei! An answer would be premature! Sensei!"
"Very good! Continue! But don't take thirty years!"
This is an experience about how to avoid completing the pattern when the pattern happens to be blatantly wrong, and how to think quickly without thinking too quickly.
Forget the question of whether you can write the equivalent abstract argument that communicates the same thought in less space. Can you do it at all? Is there any series of abstract arguments that creates the same learning experience in the reader? Entering a series of believed propositions into your belief pool is not the same as feeling yourself in someone else's shoes, and reacting to the experience, and forming an experiential skill-memory of how to do it next time.
And it seems to me that to communicate experience is a valid form of moral argument as well.
Uncle Tom's Cabin was not just a historically powerful argument against slavery, it was a valid argument against slavery. If human beings were constructed without mirror neurons, if we didn't hurt when we see a nonenemy hurting, then we would exist in the reference frame of a different morality, and we would decide what to do by asking a different question, "What should* we do?" Without that ability to sympathize, we might think that it was perfectly all right* to keep slaves. (See Inseparably Right and No License To Be Human.)
Putting someone into the shoes of a slave and letting their mirror neurons feel the suffering of a husband separated from a wife, a mother separated from a child, a man whipped for refusing to whip a fellow slave - it's not just persuasive, it's valid. It fires the mirror neurons that physically implement that part of our moral frame.
I'm sure many have turned against slavery without reading Uncle Tom's Cabin - maybe even due to purely abstract arguments, without ever seeing the carving "Am I Not a Man and a Brother?" But for some people, or for a not-much-different intelligent species, reading Uncle Tom's Cabin might be the only argument that can turn you against slavery. Any amount of abstract argument that didn't fire the experiential mirror neurons, would not activate the part of your implicit should-function that disliked slavery. You would just seem to be making a good profit on something you owned.
Can fiction be abused? Of course. Suppose that blacks had no subjective experiences. Then Uncle Tom's Cabin would have been a lie in a deeper sense than being fictional, and anyone moved by it would have been deceived.
Or to give a more subtle case not involving a direct "lie" of this sort: On the SL4 mailing list, Stuart Armstrong posted an argument against TORTURE in the infamous Torture vs. Dust Specks debate, consisting of a short story describing the fate of the person to be tortured. My reply was that the appropriate counterargument would be 3^^^3 stories about someone getting a dust speck in their eye. I actually did try to send a long message consisting only of
DUST SPECK
DUST SPECK
DUST SPECK
DUST SPECK
DUST SPECK
DUST SPECK
for a thousand lines or so, but the mailing software stopped it. (Ideally, I should have created a webpage using Javascript and bignums, that, if run on a sufficiently large computer, would print out exactly 3^^^3 copies of a brief story about someone getting a dust speck in their eye. It probably would have been the world's longest finite webpage. Alas, I lack time for many of my good ideas.)
Then there's the sort of standard polemic used in e.g. Atlas Shrugged (as well as many less famous pieces of science fiction) in which Your Beliefs are put into the minds of strong empowered noble heroes, and the Opposing Beliefs are put into the mouths of evil and contemptible villains, and then the consequences of Their Way are depicted as uniformly disastrous while Your Way offers butterflies and apple pie. That's not even subtle, but it works on people predisposed to hear the message.
But to entirely turn your back on fiction is, I think, taking it too far. Abstract argument can be abused too. In fact, I would say that abstract argument is if anything easier to abuse because it has more degrees of freedom. Which is easier, to say "Slavery is good for the slave", or to write a believable story about slavery benefiting the slave? You can do both, but the second is at least more difficult; your brain is more likely to notice the non-sequiturs when they're played out as a written experience.
Stories may not get us completely into Near mode, but they get us closer into Near mode than abstract argument. If it's words on paper, you can end up believing that you ought to do just about anything. If you're in the shoes of a character encountering the experience, your reactions may be harder to twist.
Contrast a verbal argument against the verbal belief that "non-Catholics go to Hell"; versus reading a story about a good and decent person, who happens to be a Protestant, and dies trying to save a child's life, who is condemned to hell and has molten lead poured down her throat; versus the South Park episode where a crowd of newly dead souls is at the entrance to hell, and the Devil says, "Sorry, it was the Mormons" and everyone goes "Awwwww..."
Yes, abstraction done right can keep you going where concrete visualization breaks down - the torture vs. dust specks thing being an archetypal example; you can't actually visualize that many dust specks, but if you try to choose SPECKS you'll end up with circular preferences. But so far as I can organize my metaethics, the ground level of morality lies in our preferences over particular, concrete situations - and when these can be comprehended as concrete images at all, it's best to visualize them as concretely as possible. Unless we know specifically where the concrete image is going wrong, and have to apply an abstract correction. The moral abstraction is built on top of the ground level.
I am also, of course, worried about the idea that stories aren't "respectable" because they don't look sufficiently solemn and dull; or the idea that something isn't "respectable" if can be understood by a mere popular audience. Yes, there are technical fields that are genuinely impossible to explain to your grandmother in an hour; but ceteris paribus, people who can write at a more popular level without distorting technical reality are performing a huge service to that field. I've heard that Carl Sagan was held in some disrepute by his peers for the crime of speaking to the general public. If true, this is merely stupid.
Explaining things is hard. Explainers need every tool they can get their hands on - as a matter of public interest.
And in moral philosophy - well, I suppose it could be the case that moral philosophers have discovered moral truths that are deductive consequences of most humans' moral frames, but which are so difficult and technical that they simply can't be explained to a popular audience within a one-hour lecture. But it would be a tad more suspicious than the corresponding case in, say, physics.
I realize that I speak as someone who does a lot of popularizing, but even so - fiction ought to be a respectable form of moral argument. And a respectable way of communicating experiences, in particular the experience of applying certain types of thinking skills.
I've always been of two minds about publishing longer fiction pieces about the future and its consequences. Not so much because of the potential for abuse, but because even when not abused, fiction can still bypass critical faculties and end up poured directly into the brains of at least some readers. Telling people about the logical fallacy of generalization from fictional evidence doesn't make it go away; people may just go on generalizing from the story as though they had actually seen it happen. And you simply can't have a story that's a rational projection; it's not just a matter of plot, it's a matter of the story needing to be specific, rather than depicting a state of epistemic uncertainty.
But to make shorter philosophical points? Sure.
And... oh, what the hell. Just on the off-chance, are there any OB readers who could get a good movie made? Either outside Hollywood, or able to bypass the usual dumbing-down process that creates a money-losing flop? The probabilities are infinitesimal, I know, but I thought I'd check.