Naturally, I stand in defense of ancient philosophy against the naive notion that these thinkers were "infantile" cavemen who knew fuck all about anything.
I'll talk mostly about ancient slavery and connect it to questions about the value of its modern alternative, capitalism. I won't justify either but I feel the former needs to be seen within its proper context and I profess to know a thing or two about that context.
Our modern perception of slavery is far too influences by the reality of Black slavery in the 18th-19th century South/Caribbean, in the ideological atmosphere of Anglo-American classical liberalism. This was all based on the new concept of private property justified by natural right. It is here and no earlier that we start to use human beings as mass-producing machines labor in tandem with actual mechanical machines developed in the concurrent industrial revolution. The philosophy was the same in both North and South, but in the latter the means were of flesh and blood.
Slavery in Greece & Rome was entirely different, and placed within the also different context of the family (in their words: oikos/familia). It included not only blood relatives, but also slaves, which as a whole composed a politico-economic microcosm in which the father (paterfamilias) was the effective monarch. Relationships between masters and slaves were indeed
family relationships, fostered by the notion that a healthy family functioned as a self-sufficient economic unit (the word "economy" is really the Greek word oikonomia, which means literally "household management").
But today, the economic/labor sphere and familial sphere of human life are much more separate, and the familial sphere is ever shrinking into insignificance as the economic sphere continues to encroach on our reality, severing every tie of value and community beyond an individual person's usefulness to feed the system.
Also, the concept of what constituted a natural slave was much different. First off, slaves were most often acquired as captives of war. Now despite the transitioning of Classical Greek society into a guilt culture (accelerated by a certain Plato whom you are so quick to dismiss), elements of Homeric shame culture still persisted, and one of them was honor (τιμή
. You lose a battle/war/are captured, then that loss of honor entitles you to be fit to be a slave.
Now to my buddy Aristotle. He does NOT simply acquiesce and deem just the institution of slavery as it existed in his world. Rather, he developed a theory of masters and slaves "by nature" on the common sense idea that certain people are fit to rule and some fit to be ruled. He concluded that by dehumanizing economics (say, with the construction of what he calls "automata", what we'd call industrial technology), we create a system that dehumanizes humans and makes them obsolete and redundant.
I have more to say on ethics and cosmology but I'm hungry and need to cook dinner.
