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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (56110)	8/31/2002 1:51:46 PM
From: The Philosopher	Respond to of 82486

Whoowee! You opened a can of worms there. You're perfectly correct, of course. But it doesn't sound very nice. Many -- not all by any means, but many -- wrong things can produce good things elsewhere. Slavery is only one of them. The Roman empire invaded peaceful countries, raped, and pillaged, but they brought the Pax Romana to the world. World War II brought us out of the depression. And on and on. Doesn't make the bad things good, but it shows the complexity of life, and how what is a bad or evil thing in one context can be a good thing in another.

To: epicure who wrote (56110)	8/31/2002 9:01:54 PM
From: The Philosopher	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 82486

I was thinking about this when I was out mowing. Make the assumption -- which I have no idea whether I could prove, but which I think is an entirely reasonable assumption -- that without slavery, Greece would never have been able to develop the culture it had, would never have been able to create the leisure time for philosophy and the arts. Assume, then, that without slavery, we would not have any of the works of Plato, of Aristotle, of Herodotus or Thucydides, of any of the Greek playwrights (no Orestia, no Antigone, etc.), no Euclid, no Archimedes, no Hippocrates -- none of the output of the classical Greek empire. Making that assumption, discuss the following resolution. Resolved: that the existence of slavery was an acceptable price for mankind to pay for the creation of the works of Greek literature, mathematics, and philosophy.