Why did William Wilberforce defend abolitionists who decided to continue personal slave ownership through their fight for abolition? Why did he insist this is not a form of hypocrisy?

ChatGPT ^

[ProgressingAmerica]

The following is the full question I asked:

"In his book "A letter on the abolition of the slave trade", why did William Wilberforce defend abolitionists, though not excuse abolitionists, who decided to continue personal slave ownership through their fight for abolition? Why did he insist this is not a form of hypocrisy?"

Response:

Yes. The key is that Wilberforce is making a distinction between opposing the slave trade and immediately abolishing slavery itself. That distinction can seem morally uncomfortable to a modern reader, but it is central to his argument.

What Wilberforce was defending

In A Letter on the Abolition of the Slave Trade (1807), Wilberforce is responding to an objection along roughly these lines:

If abolitionists really believe slavery is unjust, why don't they immediately free every enslaved person they themselves own—or demand the immediate emancipation of all enslaved people in the British colonies?

His answer is that the moral wrongness of slavery and the question of what political action can responsibly be taken at a particular moment are not identical questions.

He says that abolitionists had not been advocating immediate emancipation of the existing enslaved population. Rather, their immediate objective was to stop the machinery that was continually bringing additional Africans into slavery. The abolitionists regarded Africa as their "primary" object: the slave trade was producing an ongoing stream of kidnapping, violence, displacement, and death. PProject Gutenberg+1

So Wilberforce's position was essentially:

• The slave trade is intrinsically wrong and should cease immediately.
• Existing colonial slavery presents a different practical and political problem.
• Ending the trade would prevent the enslaved population from being continually replenished from Africa.
• Once the trade stopped, the condition of existing enslaved people could, in his view, be improved and the institution eventually brought toward a different future.

This is why he rejects the charge that abolitionists were logically inconsistent merely because they were not simultaneously demanding immediate emancipation.

But what about an abolitionist who personally owned slaves?

This is where your question gets particularly interesting.

Wilberforce does not simply excuse the slaveholder because he happens to support abolition. In fact, elsewhere in the book he is quite explicit that slave ownership entails serious moral responsibilities and that the West Indian system is riddled with abuses. He even distinguishes between proprietors whose conduct is humane and those whose economic interests encourage cruelty. PProject Gutenberg

His argument is instead that a person's participation in an existing institution does not necessarily make his opposition to the institution hypocritical.

Imagine someone who inherits a slave plantation. Wilberforce's reasoning allows for the possibility that this person might say:

"I believe the system in which I possess this property is morally wrong. Nevertheless, I cannot simply emancipate everyone tomorrow without considering what will happen to them, to the plantation, and to the wider society. But I can work politically to prevent the system from acquiring any more enslaved people."

That person is morally compromised, in Wilberforce's framework—but not necessarily hypocritical.

Why isn't that hypocrisy?

Because Wilberforce understands hypocrisy as pretending to believe a moral principle while deliberately acting against it, rather than simply being unable to live up to one's principles perfectly.

The distinction is roughly:

Hypocrisy:
"I claim slavery is wrong, but secretly I think it is perfectly legitimate and I oppose abolition because I want to preserve it."

Moral inconsistency or imperfection:
"I recognize that slavery is wrong, yet I remain entangled in an institution I inherited or cannot immediately dismantle; nevertheless, I sincerely work to prevent its continuation and reform its abuses."

For Wilberforce, the second person can be morally inconsistent in some respects without being a hypocrite.

And this is actually characteristic of his broader moral reasoning. He repeatedly acknowledges that human beings are affected by their circumstances, interests, inherited prejudices, and existing institutions. He notes, for example, that many absentee proprietors inherited their estates just as British people inherited other forms of property, and that their circumstances naturally shaped their perceptions. PProject Gutenberg

That doesn't mean Wilberforce says, "Therefore their behavior is fine." Quite the opposite: he asks humane proprietors to use their position to help reform the system rather than defend it. PProject Gutenberg

The deeper principle: abolition versus complicity

I think the most important thing to see is that Wilberforce is separating personal purity from political efficacy.

If he demanded:

"No one can advocate abolition unless he has already completely disentangled himself from slavery,"

then many people who had the power to help abolish the trade would be disqualified from participating in the movement.

He instead thinks we have to ask:

What does this person's conduct contribute to the continuation or destruction of the evil?

Someone who owns enslaved people but works to abolish the trade that continually creates new enslaved people is, in his view, morally different from someone who owns enslaved people and works to preserve the trade.

That distinction becomes particularly important because Wilberforce believed that gradual abolition could actually become a means of perpetuating the evil. He criticizes those who advocated gradual measures because such measures could give people "the complacencies arising from an act of justice and humanity" without requiring the sacrifice needed to end the trade. CClassic Literature

So he is not saying:

"It's okay to own slaves as long as you call yourself an abolitionist."

He's saying something subtler:

A person's involvement in an unjust institution does not by itself prove that his opposition to that institution is insincere. What matters morally is whether his actions are directed toward maintaining the injustice or dismantling it.

And there is an important tension here

From a modern perspective, you can reasonably challenge Wilberforce on this point.

If someone says, "Slaveholding is profoundly immoral," while continuing personally to profit from enslaved people's labor, there is an obvious moral tension. Calling that tension hypocrisy isn't an unreasonable judgment.

Wilberforce's response is essentially that moral culpability and hypocrisy aren't the same thing. A person can be genuinely committed to a moral cause while still being entangled in the very system he is trying to destroy. Indeed, Wilberforce's own book repeatedly recognizes that people are capable of self-deception and that economic interests can distort moral judgment. CClassic Literature

So I would summarize his argument this way:

Wilberforce doesn't defend slaveholding as morally innocent. He defends the possibility that an individual can be morally opposed to slavery while remaining temporarily or involuntarily implicated in it. For him, hypocrisy requires insincerity; mere inconsistency between one's moral ideal and one's present circumstances does not necessarily establish insincerity.

And that distinction is especially important in understanding why Wilberforce could simultaneously condemn the slave trade as an enormous moral evil, criticize abuses by slaveholders, and yet defend some slaveholders who cooperated with abolitionists rather than treating their ownership itself as proof that their abolitionism was fraudulent. PProject Gutenberg+1

If you'd like, I can also unpack the specific passage where Wilberforce makes this argument line-by-line, because his reasoning there is considerably more subtle than the modern "ends vs. means" summary suggests.PCSources

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TOPICS: History
KEYWORDS: 1619project; hypocrisy; nothypocrisy; slavery

[ProgressingAmerica]

Yes my friends.

We can destroy The 1619 Project, we just have to start reading the history of abolitionism.

[ProgressingAmerica]

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/63974

A Letter on the Abolition of the Slave Trade by William Wilberforce (1807) {Full text of this work is free and open source in the public domain}

Pages 256 to 261

Chapter title: “Abolitionists vindicated for not emancipating”

Full content of this chapter:

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And here, perhaps, it may be right to answer a strange objection, which our opponents, at a loss, surely, for sound arguments, have urged against us. I may be able also at once to vindicate the Abolitionists from two opposite charges, which have been brought against them. One class of their opponents, 257in spite of repeated and most positive assurances to the contrary, have imputed to them the design of immediately emancipating the Slaves. Can it be necessary to declare, that the Abolitionists are full as much as any other men convinced, that insanity alone could dictate such a project. On the other hand, by another class of opponents, they have been charged with being unfaithful to their own principles, in not immediately emancipating the Slaves already in the islands, as well as immediately putting a stop to our ravages in Africa. Sometimes it has been argued, that we ourselves prove by our conduct in this instance, that the laws of justice must occasionally concede somewhat to considerations of expediency. That therefore they do but extend a little further than we, the limits of that concession, when they propose that the Slave Trade itself, with all its horrors, should be suffered to continue.

It scarcely would be requisite to expose the sophistry of this argument, if it had not sometimes proceeded from men of understanding, whose use of it however can only be accounted for by the supposition, that they are utterly unacquainted with the circumstances of the case.

258Supposing they were themselves to discover an unfortunate human being, who, by long imprisonment and severe treatment, had been driven into a state of utter madness; would either justice or humanity prompt them to grant at once to this unfortunate man the unconstrained enjoyment of his natural liberty? On the contrary, would not these principles rather inculcate the duty of endeavouring by proper medical regimen, by salutary restraint, and if necessary even by the harsher expedient of wholesome discipline, to restore him to his senses, and qualify him for that freedom which he might afterwards enjoy?

The West Indian Slaves are in a state which calls for a course of treatment founded on similar principles. It would be the grossest violation and the merest mockery of justice and humanity, to emancipate them at once, in their present unhappy condition. God forbid (with most serious reverence I use the expression) that we should not desire to impart to the Negro Slaves the blessings of freedom. No man, I believe, estimates liberty more highly, or loves it better, than myself. True liberty, of course, I mean, the child of reason and law, the parent of order and happiness; such liberty, as that, of which they 259must be dull indeed who do not understand the nature and feel the value, who have lived in the enjoyment of the blessings which it dispenses under the form of a British Constitution; while they have beheld also its perfect contrast, both in nature and effects, in the wild licentiousness of a neighbouring kingdom.

It is indeed a “plant of celestial growth,” but the soil and climate must be prepared for its reception, or it will not bring forth its proper fruits. These are fruits, alas! which our poor degraded Negro Slaves are as yet incapable of enjoying. To grant it to them immediately, would be to insure not only their masters ruin, but their own. A certain previous course of discipline is necessary. They must be trained and educated for this most perfect state of manly maturity; and, by a singular felicity of coincidence, the stoppage of all further importations from Africa, with all the consequences which it introduces in its train, is the very shortest and safest path by which the Slaves can travel to the enjoyment of true liberty.
Other objections to Abolition.

Besides the great argument urged by the opponents of the abolition, that of not being able to maintain their stock of Slaves at its 260present number and force, without importation from Africa, a position which, I trust, has been now most satisfactorily refuted by decisive appeals both to speculation and experience; other allegations also were made concerning the injurious consequences of the abolition, and of these it may now be proper to take a brief review.

It should however be borne in mind, that they all depend on the determination of the great question concerning the keeping up of the population, except so far only as the African Slave Trade is in question; and, with the exception before made, of persons connected with places whence this bloody traffic is carried on (now, to the honour of the kingdom, but two, London and Liverpool), none have been found such steady advocates for the Slave Trade, as to contend for its continuance merely for it’s own sake.

The opponents of abolition, and especially some of our great colonial antagonists, have confidently stated, that our measure would effect the speedy destruction of our West Indian colonies; and that in consequence of the loss of national capital which we should sustain, and from our no longer importing the productions of our Western colonies, the abolition 261would bring down utter ruin on the commercial, manufacturing, maritime, and financial interests of the empire.

[ProgressingAmerica]

I just destroyed your “hypocrisy” card. It done wok no mo.

Enjoy your meal.

[redinIllinois]

.

[FLT-bird]

Why? Because he was wrong.

[FLT-bird]

I just destroyed your “hypocrisy” card. It done wok no mo.

No you didn't. You just proved Wilberforce was an idiot about that.

[Psalm 73]

"...for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,"
Romans 3:23

“He who is without sin among you, let him throw a stone at her first.”
John 8:7

[carcraft]

Washington wanted to free his slaves. Laws forbid educating slaves, slaves viewed education as another chore, and he never succeeded, he left that to his descendants.

[Tell It Right]

One thing to keep in mind is what's known as the straw man argument. It's virtually always a logical fallacy. In modern parlance it often comes across as cynicism.

It goes like this: if I can find one tiny thing wrong in the other person or other group and magnify that, it makes their entire argument invalid. In this case, if one person owns a slave then the entire argument for abolition is invalid.

Nope. If anything it proves the temptation for owning a slave was great. If even the people who push for abolition are tempted to own a slave then that means it should be outlawed. So the straw man argument "but, but, he owned a slave too" was a logical fallacy.

[Redmen4ever]

Do not let perfection stand in the way of progress.

I really enjoyed the 2006 movie “Amazing Grace,” about the end of the slave trade in England. (We beat the Brits to ending the slave trade. We did this by providing for the end of the slave trade in our Constitution.)

I found the scene in which Wilburforce visited his dying friend William Pitt the younger to be especially touching.

I am looking forward to the movie’s obvious sequel concerning the end of slavery the British Commonwealth in 1833. (They beat us to ending slavery, and they ended slavery in a greatly superior manner, through compensated emancipation as opposed to a civil war. Nevertheless, they wound up with problems.)

[BroJoeK]

1829 -- British West Africa Squadron
HMS Black Joke (left) anti-slave trade:

ProgressingAmerica: "I just destroyed your “hypocrisy” card.
It done wok no mo."

FLT-bird: "No you didn't.
You just proved Wilberforce was an idiot about that."

Just to be clear, William Wilberforce is history's leading abolitionist -- successful earlier & greater than any others you can name.
His legislation abolishing slavery in the British Empire freed some 800,000 slaves directly and helped free millions more indirectly through abolition of the slave trade and Britain's influence on other slaveholding countries.

So, if you want to call Wilberforce a "hypocrite" or "idiot", then you are just a pipsqueak mouse squealing at an elephant doing heavy work, claiming the elephant is not working hard enough to suit your sorry self.

[AppyPappy]

Moravians did the same. Condemn slavery while having slaves.

[FLT-bird]

Just to be clear, William Wilberforce is history's leading abolitionist -- successful earlier & greater than any others you can name. His legislation abolishing slavery in the British Empire freed some 800,000 slaves directly and helped free millions more indirectly through abolition of the slave trade and Britain's influence on other slaveholding countries. So, if you want to call Wilberforce a "hypocrite" or "idiot", then you are just a pipsqueak mouse squealing at an elephant doing heavy work, claiming the elephant is not working hard enough to suit your sorry self.

Ah, Ye Olde appeal to authority logical fallacy. Wilberforce was prominent in the antislavery movement and has a great reputation. Therefore he is an authority. Therefore he cannot be wrong about anything.

Fail.

[FLT-bird]

One thing to keep in mind is what's known as the straw man argument. It's virtually always a logical fallacy. In modern parlance it often comes across as cynicism. It goes like this: if I can find one tiny thing wrong in the other person or other group and magnify that, it makes their entire argument invalid. In this case, if one person owns a slave then the entire argument for abolition is invalid. Nope. If anything it proves the temptation for owning a slave was great. If even the people who push for abolition are tempted to own a slave then that means it should be outlawed. So the straw man argument "but, but, he owned a slave too" was a logical fallacy.

You misunderstand what a strawman argument is. A strawman argument is when you attribute a statement or position to your opponent which he does not hold or which he did not say......then proceed to argue against that pretend position or statement you falsely attributed to him.

I did no such thing. I merely said Wilberforce was wrong in his opinion that one could be an abolitionist while at the same time owning slaves.....as well as his claim that this was not hypocrisy. It clearly was hypocrisy.