Slave owners, reparations, and retroactive laws

[Emsworth]

No/ no

[Emsworth]

Saddam. Evil guy, tyrannical dictator. He will be going to trial soon for the actions he commited while he was in power. Now, technically speaking everything he did was legal - in Iraq, his word was law - so if you advocate punishing him for those thing(not for violating the WMD agreement, but his actions that killed his own people) then you are saying that in that case a retroactive law punishment is justified.

We can also look at Hitler's men who were punished for the actions of the Holocaust. The Jews killed in Germany were killed 'legally' because the Nazis ran the government(though, arguably those killed in invaded countries were not because an unjustified invasion and conquest of another country could be viewed as illegal, so actions performed by the conquerers to the populace wouldn't be legal). Same as above - retroactive law.

In these cases, one could argue that there is a "law of nations" that prohibits such actions.

[Emsworth]

Slavery is justified in certain circumstances

... such as?

[Emsworth]

Consider a hypothetical in which person A wants to murder person B. He originally chooses to boil his victim in oil, but laters decides to just shoot him. The latter action may be more merciful than the former: but it is not necessarily justified.

[Emsworth]

Ah, but I stated that it would be justified to kill the other tribe. Now, we can debate that, but if we accept the premise, then you can see why I don't think slavery is always justified.

I will accept the logic, but not necessarily the premise.

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In a society with government and laws, definitely not. The only circumstance in which it is potentially justifiable is perhaps the state of nature: but I hesitate to bring it up, debate over the so-called natural law is almost always based on arbitrary assertions, never on actual logic.

[Emsworth]

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I wonder how good of a slave Philip would make.

This line of reasoning is completely fallacious. I imagine that if you are in favor of legalized abortion, then by this logic it should have been tried on you personally.