Moral Capital

"This is another beautiful piece of scholarship by an eminent historian, but you don’t have to be an academic to read it. It’s about a really interesting subject that I think would interest anybody. It’s about the abolitionist movement in England in the late 18th century and at the turn of the 19th century, with people like Wilberforce, and it tries to explain why so many Englishmen got involved in anti-slavery. There were no slaves in England so contact with slavery wasn’t something most people would have had. So, how, starting with the Quakers in the 1880s, did huge numbers, in the end millions, of Englishmen end up signing petitions against slavery in the colonies? He argues that part of the reason was that in the debates about American independence, British politicians kept pointing to the great tension in the American case, which was that they were the ones talking about freedom but they were the ones who had slaves, and this was a stain on the beginning of the national honour of the Americans. The reply from the Americans was: ‘Well, we do have slaves, true, but you are the ones who do the nastiest part of the work. You are the ones packing people into boats like sardines.’ So there was a sort of trade-off, with the Americas saying: ‘Shame on you, British, for the slave trade.’ And the British said to them: ‘Shame on you for having slaves.’ The question of British honour then got tied up with the slave trade and people like Wilberforce could appeal to national honour when they said we have to stop the trade. So it’s a book about those debates. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The great question in the historiography of the abolition and the end of the slave trade is why Britain gave up the slave trade at the point at which it was the most profitable. Nations and businesses don’t normally give up profitable trade for moral reasons. What this book shows is that it was indeed clear to people that what they were going to do would cost, but that it was more important to do the right thing. The reason they thought it was important to do the right thing was that British honour demanded it. There were other things going on, of course. Wilberforce was an evangelical Christian and part of the rise of evangelical Christianity with its moral seriousness. So, like all historical stories, it’s complicated but at the heart of it is the concern for British honour. My own discussion of abolitionism is concerned with why working-class people got involved in anti-slavery. The short answer is that the form of slavery that developed in the New World equated manual labour with dishonour and if you’re developing a working-class consciousness of a positive kind, which was happening in England in the first half of the 19th century, you cannot accept a system that equates manual labour with dishonour. So they didn’t do it because they cared about the slaves, because they didn’t know any slaves. The paradox was that some of these workers were in the cotton industry and it was in their interest for slavery to survive in the Americas because the cotton that they were processing was made by slaves, but even they refused to ally themselves with the American South. It’s arguable that if there hadn’t been a strong working-class sentiment against slavery the British government would have sided with the South against the North in the Civil War . If they had, then slavery might well not have ended in America until much later. They got involved, in fact, before most working-class people in England had the vote. So here’s a place where honour and dishonour are very important in the history of moral change."

"This is by a leading historian, Christopher Leslie Brown. It’s the story of the British abolitionist movement, which included North America at the time. In particular, he argues that the abolition of slavery was a quite contingent event, it’s something that could easily have never happened. When I first heard this idea—from the historian who was consulting for my book—I just thought, ‘Wow, this is mad. This is just such a wild idea. Surely the abolition of slavery was more or less inevitable?’ But I really came around to having a lot of sympathy for Professor Brown’s view. The abolition of slavery was not the inevitable result of economic changes. Instead, it was a matter of changing cultural attitudes. Then there’s a further question: Was it heavily contingently dependent on a particular campaign that was run? That has more going for it than you might think as well. The Netherlands was also an extremely well-off, industrializing country and there was no abolitionist movement there. There was one attempt to get a petition going and it had very little impact. So I think it’s not at all a crazy view to say that if a particular cultural movement had not happened, we could be living with widespread, legally permitted slavery today. “We systematically underappreciate the moral importance of our descendants” Now, what does that have to do with effective altruism and longtermism? It’s relevant because changing the values and moral beliefs of a society is one of the most important, longlasting and also, in a technical sense, contingent things you can do. It really could go either way, you’re not pushing on a door that’s going to open anyway. Improving the values of the day is one way people can have a positive long-term impact. That might mean extending the circle of concern and compassion towards people in other countries and taking their moral interests more seriously, or towards non-human animals and future generations. It’s a striking question, but if the Industrial Revolution had happened in India, perhaps we would look at factory farming as this horrific, impossible, dystopian scenario. It’s obviously hard to tell because it’s a counterfactual, but it seems plausible enough to me."