In Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, many plantation owners take comfort in the knowledge that their humane, benevolent way treatment of slaves does not debase them to the cruelties of flogging. They distinguish themselves from the ogres who mistreat slaves, tyrants like Simon Legree who beat, whip, and abuse their slaves in ruthless, despicable ways. These kind masters conclude, therefore, that they are moral, Christian slave owners—not demons or monsters of evil notorious for brutality. One of the “Christian” masters argues that the reputation of Legree’s savagery does not represent the majority of slave owners who have a conscience: “You must not take that fellow to be any specimen of southern planters.” In other words, he considers himself an ethical master of slaves because he does not commit the atrocities of cruel tyrants or stoop to the debasing character of “a low, mean, brutal fellow.” To these benevolent masters, then, the definition of moral standard means merely the avoidance of the worst. In their eyes to be an improvement over the worst example earns the reputation of noble, kind, and respectable master and alleviates the guilt of committing a sin or crime.
However, one opponent of slavery who decries the unspeakable viciousness of lawless slave owners treating their servants worse than animals finds the logic of the humane slave owner specious reasoning. Hearing the weak defense that the unscrupulous Simon Legree types are a rare exception rather than the rule, he responds, “it is you considerate, humane men, that are responsible for all the brutality and outrage wrought by these wretches; because if it were not for your sanction and influence, the whole system could not keep foothold for an hour.” That is, without moderate slave owners lending their sanction 
to slavery with the rationale of their kindness to their servants, “the whole thing would go down like a mill-stone,” argues the critic. “It is your respectability and humanity that licenses and protects his brutality.” In other words, the criterion of a kind, gentle slave master is a false measure of morality and does not qualify as a true standard. To rest content in the knowledge that a person’s moral standard does not degenerate to the lowest forms of decadence hardly deserves praise. A moral standard is a high, lofty ideal that makes demands, not a rule of complacency content with the average that finds solace in the mediocrity of the lowest common denominator. A hundred kind slave owners to one vicious Simon Legree do not minimize the evil of slavery.
The critic’s logic argues that the legalization of slavery that allows for compassionate masters also justifies brutal tyrants. The whole system of slavery rests upon its legalization. The humane slave owner makes the system seem legitimate and the law reasonable. If good men and law-abiding citizens own slaves—men of public office, civic leaders, legislators, businessmen, and churchgoers—then slavery cannot be imagined as barbaric and savage. Yet the law that legalizes slavery and makes servants “chattel” or property that can be bought and sold also gives sanction to Simon Legree to do with his slaves—property—as he wishes. In short, something intrinsically evil cannot be differentiated into a spectrum of various degrees from kindness to cruelty to establish the norm of morality and immorality. A kind type of slavery does not make it good but merely a lesser type of evil. A smaller degree of evil only makes possible a greater amount of evil. If there were no benevolent masters to give the false impression of slavery’s respectability, then the Simon Legree types alone would shape the image and reputation of the slave owner—an image that would evoke loathing and undermine the corrupt nature of the practice. The whole system would sink “like a mill-stone.”
This argument also relates to the status of legalized abortion. The notorious example of Kermit Goznell’s grisly abortion practice and Planned Parenthood’s trafficking in the dismembered parts of aborted children represent the Simon Legree level of this sordid business that elicits shock and disgust. To use the logic of the kind slave owners in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, these horrific practices of violence and bloodshed belong to some crude barbaric extreme that is rare and unprecedented. Goznell delivered viable babies in the third trimester and then murdered them by cutting the spinal cords that severed the brains from the bodies. The majority of abortionists do not fall into the category of the unspeakable callousness of a Goznell, and the abortion business does not generally descend to the crassness of selling human parts for profit. Therefore, there are humane, respectable abortionists and cruel, insensitive ones. There is a moral standard and professional ethics for this profession and an unethical method for doing business in this trade. As long as an abortionist does not perform his work in the unsanitary and unprofessional conditions of Goznell’s medical practice (infected instruments, fetal remains in milk cartons), he can assume a moral superiority and adopt an air of professionalism. No specter of the barbaric or savage needs to haunt the clean professional abortionist who earns his livelihood by acts of killing so long as the patient is “safe” and the instruments sanitized.
The Kermit Goznells and the trafficking in human parts, however, do not proceed from the abuses of malpractice but from the legalization of the immorality. The ideal of moderation or temperance does not govern slavery or abortion. One cannot engage in the buying and selling of slaves only under conditions of dire financial exigency. One cannot legalize abortion for exceptional, rare cases for the health and life of the mother. The very fact of slavery’s or abortion’s legalized, established status as the law of the land inevitably leads to its worst abuses and unspeakable horrors. Legalized evil brooks no regulations and inevitably leads to violations of all restrictions or limitations. Slaves were not merely owned as servants or cotton pickers with board and room but were subjected to slave auctions, slave hunters, and destruction of black families in which husbands and wives and parents and children were separated in the buying and selling of slaves as property. Abortion has not been limited to the rare, extreme cases of saving the life of the mother or to the first trimester but has been extended as the privilege of choice permitted to all women who do not wish to give birth for any reason. For any number of reasons—sex selection, a Down syndrome child, population control—the abuses of abortion continue to expand.
Just as the Dred Scott Supreme Court decision of 1857 made possible a Simon Legree, slave auctions, slave hunters, flogging, and the separation of black families, the Roe v. Wade decision of 1973 set in motion a trajectory that inevitably leads to a Kermit Goznell, to Planned Parenthood’s trafficking in body parts, and to the cheapening of all human life to a commodity. The notion of legalized abortion to make it safe, regulated, rare, and for extreme cases is a pure fiction as chimerical as “charitable” slavery. A moral standard does not identity the good with the minimum of evil or some small proportion of injustice. A bona fide moral standard condemns all slavery and all abortions as absolute, intrinsic evils that are never justified under any conditions. A conscientious slave owner and ethical abortionist do not exist. Tempering or moderating evil to prevent it from reaching extreme conditions or epidemic proportions amounts to wishful thinking with no basis in reality. Anything intrinsically evil cannot be graduated into a scale from good-better-best but only classified as bad-worse-worst. No matter the justifying reasons for legalizing evil in any form—slavery, abortion, same-sex marriage—“that way madness lies.” Evil can only proliferate into more abuses, perversions, and injustices. These evils do not deserve toleration or modification but abolishment.
Mitchell Kalpakgian, Ph.D. has completed fifty years of teaching beginning as a teaching assistant at the University of Kansas, continuing as a professor of English at Simpson College in Iowa for thirty-one years, and recently teaching part-time at various schools and college in New Hampshire. As well as contributing to a number of publications, he has published seven books: The Marvelous in Fielding’s Novels, The Mysteries of Life in Children’s Literature, The Lost Arts of Modern Civilization, An Armenian Family Reunion (a collection of short stories), Modern Manners: The Poetry of Conduct and The Virtue of Civility, and The Virtues We Need Again. He has designed homeschooling literature courses for Seton Home School, and he also teaches online courses for Queen of Heaven Academy and part-time for Northeast Catholic College.
