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[Jev North]

And you want to believe that Amarrians are fundamentally evil.

To the extent that I'm comfortable attributing motives to anyone.. I think Casi wants to believe that the Amarr are human.

[Gottii]

Cas, seems like Lyn understood my intentions.

You did not.

There is a few main differences between any real life example of slavery and what slavery is with the Amarrians.

The level of education/literacy in the culture that it is happening. 
The fact that the Amarrians are living in a culture with very good primary education when it comes to moral issues.

The abuse towards slaves in the South can easily be explained by the facts that everyone involved in slavery, even by modern standards, badly educated and living in a society where it was quite easy to control the travel of information. It is much likely for the lines of morality be fudged when you are a days travel from your closest neighbour, there has not been any kind of formal education in the whole county and you have no other entertainment than to get drunk and fuck something.

This argument is obviously historically ignorant, and a bit offensive and biased.

The Greek and Roman slave holders were certainly urbane, sophisticated, and educated, certainly by their standards and likely by the standards of todays mediocre levels of mass education.  They were quite skilled in rhetoric, mathematics, history, philosophy, morality and culture.

They still fucked their slaves.

Regarding the American South, and how "uneducated" it was as it applies to the plantation owners.

To say that every plantation owner was uneducated and an ignorant barbarian means you literally have no idea what youre talking about when it comes to the slave owning class of the American South.  For example...

Thomas Jefferson was a brilliant and well educated man.  Vast intellect, well versed in rhetoric, philosophy, and the classics.  An accomplished architect and knowledgeable in natural sciences.  Did long treatises on morality and values, government and popular and inherent rights.  He founded one of the top 15 or so Universities in the U.S. (University of Virginia), and by extension one of the better universities in the world.  He traveled the world both for education and as a diplomat.  Even his British enemies held his academic accomplishments and writings in high regard. He's likely on the short list for most influencial political thinkers the world over (i.e. if you live in a country with any kind of constitution or explicit government compact, its influenced at least in part by his ideas)

He was certainly smarter and better educated than you or I.   

He still fucked his slaves. 

Knowledge and education is absolutely no cure for humans acting like humans.

[Lyn Farel]

Our problem is not that the amarr are human or not, our problem is that people seem to assume that the amarr are somehow stuck in a post medieval age. In the age of high-tech information technology, camera drones, nano technology, medias ; ACN is from the lore, and it indicates that amarrians behave like use everyday, they watch TV, news, and benefit of a lot of social comfort that any sci fy civilization would have.


@Gotti : nobody is saying that Amarr never fuck their slaves. No more than these days it would be stupid to say that nobody gets raped in the street or whatever...

[Gottii]

@Gotti : nobody is saying that Amarr never fuck their slaves. No more than these days it would be stupid to say that nobody gets raped in the street or whatever...

No, the argument is that the Amarr dont abuse their slaves because theyre smarter and better educated than past slave holders.  Im saying that 1.) thats unduly dismissive to the education levels of abusive slavers and slave owners in the past and 2.) there is zero indication that simply being smart, educated and knowledgeable means you wont abuse your slaves, or anyone else for that matter.

[Jev North]

They're a wonderfully advanced future society. That is also a slave-keeping theocracy ruled by hereditary nobility. Straight extrapolation from current societal norms seems a little.. unthematic.

[Casiella]

I've never said the Amarrians are fundamentally evil. To the contrary, see my reply above that clarified, extended, and agreed with ArtOfLight.

My point is that we cannot base our views on one person's hope that the future is more civilized than today. I certainly hope it is, but then I personally hope for a future that resembles the Gallente Federation more than the Caldari State.

[Arnulf Ogunkoya]

And you want to believe that Amarrians are fundamentally evil.

To the extent that I'm comfortable attributing motives to anyone.. I think Casi wants to believe that the Amarr are human.

Both OOC and IC I'd be inclined to go with human rather than evil.

My character feels that if the empire wishes people to convert, then slaving is a bad way of going about it when dealing with equivalent or better tech groups. He also feels that the production of splinter groups like the Sani Sabik and the EoM say some very telling and uncomplimentary things about Amarrian theology. However he also accepts that most Imperials honestly believe in what they are doing.

So he will kill who he has to in defence of his society and it's values, but given he is fighting other capsuleers killing is not enough. To truly win one must change the enemy's own point of view (or arrange to have all their clones destroyed). And Imperial theology has changed over the centuries, as far as I can tell this is even acknowledged IC.

OOC given what we know about the people that became the Amarr. The original prophet comes over as either deluded or a self-centred maniac. Also the start of Athran slavery reads like a self-interest and protecting power thing rather than anything moral. The moral justifications seem to have been added later.

I also get the idea IC & OOC that the upper end of the society tends to treat the religion as a tool rather than something to be taken seriously. I will freely admit that is my bias though.

[Matariki Rain]

I went to sleep wondering if I'd had a comprehension fail while reading lallara's post. I think to some extent I might have, since the first and second parts seem to have quite different messages.

I describe Amarrian society as being like X, Y and Z. 

-- Looked at from within Amarrian society, those things are fine.

-- Looked at from our perspective, those things are horrible.

Am I trying to say Amarrians are evil? I... wasn't even engaging on that level, actually. I'm more interested in whether they're plausible and interesting. Would that be an interesting discussion, or would it turn into sound and fury?

I'll mention here that I play a Matari clan which fails my own real-world legal and ethical requirements. This isn't a case of trying to paint the IC opposition as bad: it's exploring the different ways in which humans live, together and individually.

[lallara zhuul]

The reference to education during history was not clearly meaning the elite of the society.

The elite of the society has always been well educated, but has the elite been the ones swinging the whip and fucking the slaves. (I know that fucking slaves seemed to be the favourite pastime in the South, why the hell would most of the African Americans have at least 12.5% Caucasian DNA in them.)

Rarely.

I meant it as the average level of education within the society, which was piss poor in Rome and in the South at the time of slavery.

I may be a tad naive, but I don't think that being human entails anything that is perceived as Evil.

Abuse of self and others, murder, suicide, addiction...

I think that 'the dark side' is something banal, animal like, something that only comes out if a person has been taught wrong ways of dealing with things by the family, society, culture and the school system.
There is nothing wrong with emotions that are considered destructive, but there is constructive ways of using them or just letting them go.

But for some reason I cannot accept the 'fact' that it is 'human' to abuse power.

Some acts take you out of the human category to the animal category.

[Nicoletta Mithra]

I think Ciarente has a point
Most of human history woman were not much more than property of a man, no one was considering that if their man raped them that it was rape and and so on.

Does from that follow that the same is true for all societies that know marriage between man and woman?

I hope current societies - well, some of them at least - show that those things can change.

If it is true that - even though all human societies up to a certain point in time treated the wives of men like this - it is not true anymore for all societies, than it follows that the same principle has to be applied to slavery:

The fact that many societies had no fuzz with what the slave-owner did with his slaves doesn't mean that a society in the future will treat slaves just the same way.

As Esna argued in the "Mercedes thread" it is quite probable that sex with slaves is seen as counterproductive to the goal of slavery as seen within the Empire.

As Casiella said there:  if the purpose of slavery is enlightenment, then rape does not have a place in the arrangement. And the stated purpose of slavery within the Empire is enlightenment of the slave.

The people who are eligible of holding slaves within the Empire are a minority to begin with and thus they are easily monitored.

If we think of slavery as something not unlike our modern systems for keeping criminals, processing immigrants and caring for disabled people - all systems where people exert control over others, are in positions of power that can be abused - and we ask, if and how many of the people that are in power there do abuse this power for their own gain and abuse their charges - be it prisoners, immigrants or the disabled - I sincerely hope that the answer will be that most civilized modern societies have found mechanisms to keep that from happening or at least to reduce it to a minimum.

Why then should the Amarr not be able to have found such mechanisms? Because earlier cultures holding slaves didn't? That's really as good as denying humans the ability to make (ethical) progress. By that very logic we should expect men to rape their woman and no one caring for it in our societies.

That argument that Amarr do it because "the Romans and Americans did it" does just not click.

[Casiella]

Nico, my point (and the point of several other people) isn't that Amarrian society says it's okay. Our point is that Amarrian society almost certainly says it's not okay but that it happens in some places anyway.

[Matariki Rain]

Nico, my point (and the point of several other people) isn't that Amarrian society says it's okay. Our point is that Amarrian society almost certainly says it's not okay but that it happens in some places anyway.

In the Mercedes thread I suggested a stronger case: that a certain amount of in-house sexual activity between Holders and slaves is probably in the "tolerated/okay/expected" part of the spectrum, at least in some Amarrian circles. Since then I've also argued that it doesn't seem to be seen as a perversion, although having an emotional relationship with a slave is something you'd hide.

I'm also totally on-board with people like Esna deciding that this isn't okay and they should be encouraging others to give it up. Sounds fantastic. You get to have the sorts of social-change interactions that people have in the real world about slavery, spanking children, fox hunting and meat-eating. I would love to know that those were going on somewhere in the Amarrian zone.

[Syylara/Yaansu]

There's plenty of modern, civilized societies where sexual abuse occurs against an exploitable class: children.

My understanding of psychological study of the nature of sexual abuse is the driving factor of this activity is rarely sexual gratification, it is power and control.

These two issues go somewhat hand-in-hand.  Generally the perpetrator of the abuse is someone in a position of authority over the victim such as parents, teachers, priests, scout leaders, etc.  As our society has grown more and more equal (to some degree, anyways), the pool of potentially exploitable people over which this kind of dominance can be exercised has changed.

I think sexual abuse/exploitation probably occurs in all of the EvE cultures, the victims and perpetrators are different depending on the nature of their respective societies.  In Ammarian culture, the paradigm is fairly easy to spot and thus gets portrayed and/or presumed to fall into the cliche'.

[Nicoletta Mithra]

So, the basic argument is: crimes do (at times) happen? (I think that's also what you're saying, basically, Syylara?) That sounds kind'a trivial to me.

And not quite what e.g. Mata implied apparently in her "Mercedes thread" _ indeed it seemed to me that she was making a stronger case here as she just clarified - or what Ulphus was trying to argue for with his Karsoth example.

It seems to me that some people here argue that slavery implies (all kinds of and among them sexual) abuse of the slave or at least that slave abuse (or some kinds of it) is okay by Imperial standards.

So, while it is true that we - or at least most people - today do think of slavery as implying abuse of the slave and while it maybe true that this has been historically correct for long spans of time, it just isn't an analytical truth o- like "a bachelor is a man that isn't married" is.

Just as it isn't an analytical truth that being a wife means that it's okay - by the standards of all societies that know marriage - to be abused by the husband. Whether or not abuse of a slave is okay and to what extent is contingent on as much factors as it is in the case of a woman.

The argument Esna gives does rest on premises that are true for Amarrian slavery for quite some time now. It's kind'a weird to assume that while Amarrians took it for granted that the goal of slavery is the enlightenment of slaves but it occurred to no one that raping slaves might be counterproductive in that regard. At least to me it's more reasonable to assume that Amarr has for some time already mechanisms in place to identify and punish holders that do that to their slaves. After all that's quite central to the idea of slavery which is justified religiously - thus it's probably not something that would be brushed over within the Empire or dealt with lightly.

Religion and it's tenets are srs bznz in Amarr, after all. So, really, I can hardly see how it could be in the "tolerated/okay/expected" part of the spectrum - rather in the "if there's nobody noticing it, there's nobody judging me over it" end of the spectrum and thus maybe in the "it's unfortunately happening more often than the TC and any decent Amarr would wish for - down with this sort of thing!" end of the spectrum.

[Lyn Farel]

@Gotti : nobody is saying that Amarr never fuck their slaves. No more than these days it would be stupid to say that nobody gets raped in the street or whatever...

No, the argument is that the Amarr dont abuse their slaves because theyre smarter and better educated than past slave holders.  Im saying that 1.) thats unduly dismissive to the education levels of abusive slavers and slave owners in the past and 2.) there is zero indication that simply being smart, educated and knowledgeable means you wont abuse your slaves, or anyone else for that matter.

Well, we are probably not reading the same thread then. 

Nico, my point (and the point of several other people) isn't that Amarrian society says it's okay. Our point is that Amarrian society almost certainly says it's not okay but that it happens in some places anyway.

Then everyone agrees with everyone, that's wonderful. \o/