...Lincoln’s Political and Moral Slavery Dilemma The sixteenth President of the United States of America, the Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln casts quite a historical shadow over any other competing figure. Lincoln was brought into the world on February 12th, 1809 to an incredibly modest upbringing in which he would mold himself into a successful lawyer and later a politician. Abraham received little formal education during his childhood, eventually acquainting himself with the law through the apprenticeship system. After rising through the Illinois legislature structure, Lincoln went on to serve in the House of Representatives on behalf of the state of Illinois before gaining widespread recognition from his debates with competing Senate candidate Stephen A. Douglas in 1858.The expansion of slavery into the United States new territories was the hotly contested issue of these debates, Lincoln’s stance would eventually propel him into the national spotlight and later the Presidency. Abraham Lincoln’s views on slavery were split between his political obligations and his moral beliefs, his political actions were influenced by his desire to preserve the Union, and his moral stance on the issue largely stemmed from his deep-seeded belief in the power of the Constitution, not the political or social equality of another race. Abraham Lincoln’s view on slavery was segregated in itself, between how he perceived the issue on a political level and as a moral dilemma facing the United...
Words: 1471 - Pages: 6
...American Anti-Slavery Society. As abolitionists, their views on slavery were close and each defended the other from attacks by critics. They focused on the superiority of “moral suasion” over “political agitation.” Yet, their friendship ended and the two became distant towards each other. Garrison and Douglass split in 1848 when Douglass started his own newspaper, The North Star. Douglass then changed his mind over political activity, giving the two men opposing views. Frederick Douglass’s way of promoting the abolitionist cause was the most effective in that it took less time to bring upon emancipation. It only took three years until it was confirmed that “moral suasion” and nonviolence were inadequate to destroy slavery. William Lloyd Garrison believed that people would be willing to change their acceptance of slavery if they could see the morality of enslaved people. Though, towards the end of the 1830’s many abolitionists were moving away from the philosophy of moral suasion and onto political action. Political agitation was not only the faster way to abolish slavery; it was the more overpowering and everlasting way to abolitionism. After The Liberator came out with news articles on slavery, the Northern states began to pass laws doing away with slavery and Southern Slaveholders freed thousands of slaves. However, after the founding of The American Colonization Society in 1817, people went back to supporting slavery when cotton production expanded. Moral Suasion does...
Words: 723 - Pages: 3
...Case Study - Slavery in Chocolate 1. What are the systemic, corporate, and individual ethical issues raised by this case? • Local and Global Laws are not enforced due to lack of resources or the desire to enforce the laws. • The number of farmers (1M) and the system makes it difficult to identify the source of the cocoa beans harvested using slavery. • Global decline in cocoa bean prices drove farmers to use slavery to lower labor cost. • Corporations are unable or unwilling to take action to improve the situation in harvesting the cocoa bean. • The fundamental demands of shareholder profits drives corporation to turn a blind eye to how cocoa is harvested. • Chocolate Consumers are kept so far removed from the Cocoa source that they are unaware or choose to be ignorant of the cost involved to create chocolate. 2) In your view is the kind of child slavery discussed in this case absolutely wrong no matter what or is it only relatively wrong i.e. if one happens to live in a society like ours that disapproves of Slavery. I believe that Slavery is wrong. Kidnapping is wrong. Forced labor for children is wrong. I would like to believe Slavery is absolutely wrong but this is coming from a Western perspective where we hold personal freedom as a right. We also don’t see the populations of poverty that some third world countries face. In countries where there is a high infant/child death rate due to poverty, and starvation, living as a slave could be seen as a preferable...
Words: 1274 - Pages: 6
...history of Catholic Moral Theology, we have had to deal with the topic of what can and cannot change within the Catholic Church. This happened to be the title of the primary book that we used for this course. This book, by John T. Noonan, is entitled A Church That Can and Cannot Change: The Development of Catholic Moral Teaching. A theme which Noonan immediately focuses on throughout the book is one which touches many of us deeply, slavery. As a person who has studied both law and religion and who is now embarking on a study of moral theology & ethics, I was highly interested in reading what John T. Noonan a distinguished scholar -author and member of the U.S. Court of Appeals- had to say in such an arena. Having heard him lecture, I was interested to see how his viewpoint translated into this type of arena. I was not disappointed. Throughout our course we not only discussed how this work dealt with such a topic, but we also discussed our own viewpoints on this very topic. Within the following paper I will discuss the issue of slavery, in the form of a synthetic paper, and how not only how it has evolved, but also the various positions the church has had concerning such an issue. As a backdrop, I will also use what Noonan outlined in his book as well. Therefore, this paper will be in the form of a review of Noonan thoughts (which will utilize various points from my prior presentation on this topic)/synthetic paper on the issue of slavery within the Catholic...
Words: 5751 - Pages: 24
...the University of Virginia. Early on, Dr. Gallagher analyzed the failure of America’s political leadership to find a compromise on slavery in the days and years leading up to secession and the catastrophic and bloody war. There was the careful attempt to admit to the Union, in tandem, one slave state and one Free State to insure the balance of power in the Senate. Henry Clay of Kentucky, the “great compromiser” helped to work out the division of Western territory so that this balance was to be preserved “in perpetuity.” Slavery, however, was not a political battle that could ultimately be negotiated; it was rather a moral battle that did not lend itself to compromise. It pitted a new consciousness against a dying definition. Slavery could not be partially moral or moral under some circumstances. It was either moral or immoral. There was no middle ground. In the slavery debate, those who shared the new consciousness were quite clear. Human beings cannot be held in bondage. This new consciousness challenged those definitions, which suggested that some people did not qualify as human beings; that some people were primitive, childlike, created to be subservient, and were, therefore, fit for nothing other than manual labor. Within that definition, slavery was deemed to be morally acceptable and those who held this position actually believed that slavery was virtuous, since the slaves were assumed to be receiving the benefits of better health, longer life and wonderful new opportunities...
Words: 1720 - Pages: 7
...Business Ethics “The case of slavery in the chocolate industry” ‘ What are the systemic, corporate and individual ethical issues raised by the case? First of all what is ethics? According to Manuel G Velasquez “Ethics is the discipline that examines ones moral standard or the moral standards of a society. It asks how these standards applies to our lives and whether these standards are reasonable or unreasonable, that is, whether they are supported by good reasons or poor ones.” In a nut shell ethics is what individuals and the society view as being right or wrong. The case "Slavery in the Chocolate Industry" discusses labor exploitation in the chocolate industry. It specifically addresses the cocoa beans grown on farms in West Africa, especially the Ivory Coast and Ghana, which make up close to half of the world's chocolate. The cocoa farmers of these nations, rely on slaves to harvest their beans, and in some cases, enslavement of young males. The plight of the enslaved children was publicized around the world in September 2000 when True Vision, a British television company, took videos of slave boys on several Ivory Coast farms and broadcast a documentary in Britain and the United Sates. In 2002, the Chocolate Manufactures Association and the World Cocoa Foundations along with major producers signed an agreement to establish a system of certification to certify use of “slave free” cocoa beans. There are many ethical issues raised in this case, let’s commence...
Words: 1087 - Pages: 5
...STUDENT: PLATON OANA MADALINA SA I TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………… p.3 2. THE ISSUE OF SLAVERY IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA……….. p.4 3. THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION ……………………………………..p.7 "From a genuine abolition point of view, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull and indifferent, but measuring him by the sentiment of his country - a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to discuss - he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined." Frederick Douglass, 1876 source? 1. INTRODUCTION He survived the tragedy and depression to become America's Greatest President. He had the courage to destroy slavery, but he took a Civil War and the loss of 600,000 lives; his beliefs cost him his life, but without him the United States of America would not exist today. Abraham Lincoln, America's model hero, was a man whose courage saved the nation from destruction. His early life was poor and brutal; he was born on the 12th of February 1809 in a one room cabin in rural Kentucky, a frontier state of America. His family were farmers, he was the first of his family to read; Abraham Lincoln was different to from his friends. The young Lincoln was a child of induce curiosity, he loved to hear people, gave well crafted, well delivered speeches. He would often go to places where such speeches were being made; he memorized parts of them and he would...
Words: 3275 - Pages: 14
...Slavery in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: A Metaphor Over the past three centuries, only a handful of American authors have achieved such success that their work continues to be read and studied decades, even hundreds of years after their deaths. Mark Twain achieved this success by writing some of the greatest novels American literature has ever seen. Arguably his most famous work, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn essentially revolutionized American literature. One might say that Twain initiated the transition from romantic epics to more realistic-based tales. A second profound American author, Ernest Hemingway, even said, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn,” (Hemingway). Within this work, Twain uses some topics that were very controversial at the time to present an even more insightful idea. While one of the main issues in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is slavery, Twain uses it as an allegory for the struggle, that still exists today, between an individual’s conscience and society’s norms and ideals. In this novel, the setting and time period during which it takes place plays a significant part in the overall plot. Though Twain wrote this novel in the 1880s, several years after the Emancipation Proclamation, he chose to set the novel a few decades before the Emancipation Proclamation. In choosing this, he enabled himself to highlight slavery as one of the main issues of the novel. During the time when the...
Words: 1395 - Pages: 6
...The issue of slavery was one that divided the nation like nothing else had in the brief history of the United States. It was one that many of the founding fathers disagreed with, but the reasons as to why they did not think a system of slavery should continue, were extremely varied. Another confounding aspect was that many of the founding fathers owned slaves, even though they did not think such an oppressive way of life was just. Two of these founding fathers were Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Rush, both slave owners who spoke for the equality of slaves, but had different understandings of equality and freedom. Rush looks at slavery as a blatant disregard of the moral human code. He argues for a moratorium on the importation of slaves’ form Africa,...
Words: 1252 - Pages: 6
...RELATIVISM AND MORALITY Week 2 Assignment Sarah Knight SOC120: Introduction to Ethics and Social Responsibility Prof. Thomas Reeder November 4, 2013 Relativism and Morality Moral choices are conducted on a daily basis, by every culture, which can be viewed on an ethical scale of right or wrong, by other cultures. In her writing of “Some Moral Minima”, Lenn E. Goodman views several aspects of morality and relativism, and argues that certain things are just wrong. In presenting my own morals, I agree with this statement; however, pondering the image, that only one accurate ethic exists and that we may be able to find universal moral requirements and arrive at a multiethnic agreement on issues presented by Goodman is a parable. In this paper, I will state my opinion on challenges Goodman presents to relativism. I will also provide my thoughts on if there are such universal moral requirements. In Goodman’s initial area of discussion of “Some Moral Minima; Genocide, Famine, and Germ Warfare (Goodman, L.E., 2010)”, she states “Genocide targets individuals as members of a group, seeking to destroy a race, a culture, a linguistic or ethnic identity (Goodman, L.E., 2010)”. I reflect back to after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks were made on The United States. The threat of germ warfare became a very real aspect of war for our nation. Governmental groups, that we were at war against, were considering the decision to use this type of weapon in order to defeat their...
Words: 1212 - Pages: 5
...What are the systemic, corporate and individual ethical issues raised by this case? Slavery in the chocolate industry case has systemic, corporate and individual ethical issues.Firstly, from the point of systemic ethical issue , economic systems should be taken intoconsideration. Between 1996 and 2000, cocoa bean prices had declined. The decline wasdictated by the global forces over which farmers had no control. With low prices, farmersturned to slavery to try to cut labor cost for their survival in this situation. There is another systemic issue relates to the legal aspect of slavery in the chocolate industry. Actually, slaveryon farms is illegal in the Ivory Coast but the law is rarely enforced. Open borders, a shortageof enforcement officers, and the willingness of local officials to accept bribes from membersof the slave trade all contribute to the problem.Secondly, corporate ethical issue raised by the case. Middlemen who grind and processcocoa beans they acquire from the Ivory Coast and sell the product to manufacturers. Somiddlemen aware of the slavery labor problem. After the media attention and antislaverygroup activities, U.S. Senator Tom Harkin and U.S. Representative Eliot Engel, the membersof the Chocolate Manufacturers Association and the World Cocoa Foundation, together withseveral human rights groups and the Ivory Coast. signed Memorandum of Cooperation. Theyalso agreed to establish a system of certification. But the problem is, they can not control over anything...
Words: 583 - Pages: 3
...Slavery in the Chocolate Factory 1. What are the systemic, corporate, and individual ethical issues raised by this case? First of all, this article was interesting to read because it pertains to ethical issues on several levels as we can see throughout and I personally never knew about slavery in the chocolate industry. From a systemic approach, ethical issues arise from the producer or farmers of the cocoa beans to the manufacturer of chocolate and ultimately the end consumer of the goods. As the media and formal documentaries have pointed out, the reason for child slavery in this industry is because farmers need to keep their costs down in order to meet the demand of the world’s chocolate consumption. This world consumption is the driving force that continues to sustain child slavery in areas like the Ivory Coast. We can see that some governmental action has tried to disrupt the systemic ethical issues that arise, but the problem continues today because the corporate level has a lot of political weight that adds to the problem. The corporate figures of our world including Hersey Foods Corp. and M&M Mars, Inc. continue to add to the problem of child slavery in the Ivory Coast. With self-interests in mind, these chocolate producing powerhouses unethically know that they are toying with legislation to give Americans the impression that they are actually attempting to solve the issues at hand. We can see from their lack of effort and extended deadlines to complete their...
Words: 714 - Pages: 3
...Ethical Relativism 1. Ethical Relativism: In this lecture, we will discuss a moral theory called ethical relativism (sometimes called “cultural relativism”). Ethical Relativism: The view that what is morally right or wrong is dependent upon what one’s culture believes is right or wrong. In short, if your society or culture BELIEVES that some action is morally wrong, then it IS morally wrong for everyone within that society. Businesspeople often claim something similar. They say, for instance, that businesses operate under their own system of morality. What is deemed to be right by some business IS right for that business. This makes morality relative. For instance, if one society says cannibalism is morally wrong, while another says it is morally permissible, then the fact of whether or not cannibalism is morally wrong will just be a relative one—namely, whether or not it is wrong for someone will just depend upon which society they are in. We will now ask the question: Does some action become right or wrong just because one’s society, or employer, SAYS it is right or wrong? Or rather, is it the case that there are some moral standards that apply to ALL businesses and societies, regardless of whether or not those societies believe in those standards? 2. The Argument From Disagreement: Why believe that morality is relative? Relativists often say that widespread moral disagreement proves that their view is true. They say: 1. Different people have different beliefs...
Words: 2510 - Pages: 11
...the racial inferiority of blacks. Jefferson concluded that blacks were originally from a distinct race, and that they were inferior to all whites. This result led Americans to accept the egalitarian ideas of the Declaration of Independence and racially based slavery. “All men, it would seem, were "endowed by their Creator" with natural rights, but because blacks were physically and mentally unequal, they were legitimately enslaved by whites. In a sense, the American Revolution made the scientific and racist defense of slavery necessary (Miller Center of Public Affairs) .” At the time of the American Revolution,...
Words: 666 - Pages: 3
...this war was that of a moral dispute between two sections who both wanted different things. Slavery became the issue that spread across the nation and was disputed back and forth between the North and South sections of the country. Abolitionists were focused upon in the North and tried to get their message across to those owning slaves in the South. They expressed moral disapproval but engaged in few out-in- the-open activities. "To the extent that there was an organized antislavery movement, it centered on the concept of colonization-the effort to encourage the resettlement of American blacks in Africa or the Caribbean." (Brinkley, American History 342) Among these Abolitionists, was a famous U.S. journalist who published The Liberator and helped lead the successful Abolitionist campaign against slavery in the U.S. In his first issue of The Liberator, he boldly states his opinion on the issue of slavery: "I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation....I am in earnest-I will not equivocate-I will not excuse-I will not retreat a single inch-AND I WILL BE HEARD." (www.britannica.com) The Civil War forced Garrison to choose between his pacifist beliefs and emancipation. In December 1865 he published the last issue of The Liberator and announced that his vocation as an abolitionist is ended. (www.britannica.com) When the issue of slavery peaked, the South decided that the best bet would be to secede. As for the entire issue of slavery, "basically the South wanted...
Words: 440 - Pages: 2
