Judging History (branch off from election thread)

[Lemur]

The very first sentence of the wiki article for slavery you posted:
[B]Slavery is a system under which people are treated as property to be bought and sold, and are forced to work.

Two thoughts:

1. Wikipedia is concise and useful, but not definitive. I linked to it not to prove a point but to provide background.
2. If "forced to work" is a necessary condition for slavery, how do we classify documented cases of harem slaves who were never used by their owners? By your definition, they were not slaves, because they never did their work. By my definition they are (correctly) classified as slaves; by yours they are not.

Nah, I think my definition is both shorter and more accurate: slavery is becoming someone else's property. Period. Work (willing or otherwise), how you arrived in the condition, all of that was irrelevant to your ultimate status. Slave was slave, free was free.

-edit-

This debate has my inner history nerd all hot and bothered. Time to read about the three Servile Wars again, or maybe dust off my Sallust.

I think you'll find that emphasizing compassion and empathy goes straight back to religious roots.

That makes no sense on any level. We are social creatures; groups that cooperate are more likely to prosper than groups that do not. So just from a utilitarian point of view, it's easy to see that empathy is a necessary trait for us. (There's a reason that we find sociopaths, who can feel no empathy, creepy and fascinating.)

I value religion, but to say that an emphasis on compassion and empathy must lead back to religion is unsupportable.

[Sasaki Kojiro]

That makes no sense on any level. We are social creatures; groups that cooperate are more likely to prosper than groups that do not. So just from a utilitarian point of view, it's easy to see that empathy is a necessary trait for us. (There's a reason that we find sociopaths, who can feel no empathy, creepy and fascinating.)

I value religion, but to say that an emphasis on compassion and empathy must lead back to religion is unsupportable.

Yes, groups that bond together. Universal compassion as a central virtue is much more a feature of certain religions. Having slaves as you mentioned has a very long history and is perfectly natural evolutionarily.

The fact that empathy is a necessary trait and so basic is why it's not always emphasized or made out as the most important...