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Actual Moral Relativism deployed in defense of slavery (https://www.reddit.com/r/themotte/comments/ax3czw/_/eht5zgf)
22

Seriously, fuck those people. I’d like to quote David Graeber’s take on the whole “they were selling each other anyway” thing

We need only imagine what would be likely to happen in our own society if a group of space aliens suddenly appeared, armed with undefeatable military technology, infinite wealth, and no recognizable morality - and announced that they were willing to pay a million dollars each for human workers, no questions asked. There will always be at least a handful of people unscrupulous enough to take advantage of such a situation - and a handful is all it takes.

This was a Rick & Morty episode.
> There will always be at least a handful of people unscrupulous enough to take advantage of such a situation - and a handful is all it takes. The power of the free market. ​
Seems like a good enough reason to not make everything subordinate to it?
Yeah, if you want to stop some profitable activity, you need to regulate it in some way.

As we all know there were definitely not contemporaries of slaves who thought slavery was wrong, and something is definitely only wrong if it contravenes social conventions.

For me, immoral is an act that defies a current good equilibrium.

No.

Is there a word for an appeal to nature applied to the status quo? "Society's current norms are good because they're society's current norms?" Maybe it's just conservatism. That or they just value order over justice. It depends on whether it's the "current" or the "equilibrium" that is making the society "good". There is a distinction, even though either one is horseshit.
[System justification theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_justification)
**System justification** System justification theory (SJT) is a theory within social psychology that system-justifying beliefs serve a psychologically palliative function. It proposes that people have several underlying needs, which vary from individual to individual, that can be satisfied by the defense and justification of the status quo, even when the system may be disadvantageous to certain people. People have epistemic, existential, and relational needs that are met by and manifest as ideological support for the prevailing structure of social, economic, and political norms. Need for order and stability, and thus resistance to change or alternatives, for example, can be a motivator for individuals to see the status quo as good, legitimate, and even desirable. *** ^[ [^PM](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=kittens_from_space) ^| [^Exclude ^me](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiTextBot&message=Excludeme&subject=Excludeme) ^| [^Exclude ^from ^subreddit](https://np.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/about/banned) ^| [^FAQ ^/ ^Information](https://np.reddit.com/r/WikiTextBot/wiki/index) ^| [^Source](https://github.com/kittenswolf/WikiTextBot) ^] ^Downvote ^to ^remove ^| ^v0.28
Appeal to tradition?
Just good ol' circular logic.
[deleted]
*Hi human!* It's your **4th Cakeday** cyaran! ^(hug)

Ah, new week, new discussion on slavery.

>New week, ~~new~~ same discussion on slavery FTFY

Why? The wonderful and correct moral principle of whataboutism.

2postironic4sneer

Not even just base moral relativism (the idea that different systems of morality exist is pretty uncontroversial), but normative, meta-ethical moral relativism. You don’t see that too often (and thank the powers that may or may not be that we don’t).