Seneca Moral essays
Seneca: Slaves are allowed to run and take sanctuary at…
Slaves are allowed to run and take sanctuary at the statue of a god, though the laws allows a slave to be ill-treated to any extent, there are nevertheless some things which the common laws of life forbid us to do to a human being.
The passage follows a public-domain translation of Seneca’s moral essays. The reading beside it is ours.
Every person has a floor beneath which we must not let our treatment of them fall. Seneca makes this point in a society that legally allowed terrible abuse, which makes his insistence especially forceful: customs and laws can permit what basic humanity should reject. That warning remains current. Policies, contracts, office hierarchies, and social habits may tell us what we can get away with. They do not settle what is right. The cleaner, contractor, intern, cashier, prisoner, migrant, or person with little social power is not a test of how much control we have. They are a test of whether we recognize another human being when there is no reward for doing so. Do not let legal permission become moral permission. Today, notice one interaction in which you hold an advantage and use it to make the other person's experience more respectful, not merely more efficient.
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