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societies have better means available for helping even the most “savage” population to improve.
The abolition of slavery in a more advanced society improves every group’s prospects for
happiness. Emancipation even benefits the members of the slave-owning class, in the long run—if
not the slave owners themselves than their children. They will actually have a better chance of
leading genuinely happy lives, because possessing arbitrary power over others shapes a person’s
character in ways that are not conducive to happiness. People’s prospects for happiness are
strongest in a society that where certain moral rules are generally accepted and obeyed, including
a general principle of justice that requires a moral agent to follow through after having made a
promise or otherwise encouraged others to form expectations about the agent’s future conduct
and to make plans based on those expectations. Unfortunately, perhaps, this principle has the
somewhat disquieting implication that slave owners must be compensated when the state forces
them to free their slaves.
Convention