Christopher Brown

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1,098 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jan 2026 last heard 20 Jan

Christopher Brown’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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80,000 Hours Podcast · #145 Classic episode – Christopher Brown on why slavery abolition wasn't inevitable · 20 Jan 2026 podcast

you have American colonies essentially challenging the principle of parliamentary sovereignty.

And that is something that is very confusing to British observers.

And as a consequence, American colonists who don't like what Parliament does begin to talk about the question of representation because they say Parliament can't be sovereign if we're not represented and there are whole sets of arguments around that.

But there are also arguments about rights that precede parliamentary rule, rights that are natural, that are inalienable.

And those are obviously arguments made to try to justify political positions that are having a hard time winning favor on the other side of the Atlantic.

And there are Quaker entrepreneurs, and Anthony Benezet in particular, who hear this argument

political back and forth and say, hey, the polemicists are starting to talk about natural rights.

Well, if we're going to talk about natural rights, how about the natural rights of these people, right?

So it's a kind of opportunism by Quakers who see in the political controversies

that lead to the American Revolution, an opportunity to take an issue that they have been discussing among themselves and find a wider audience for it.

Now, there are other things that are going on, too.

I mean, there's also a real change in the third quarter of the 18th century around notions of the kind of a revived notion that slavery is unnatural.

It is only conventional.

It is only convenient.

It's only expedient.

You know, Montesquieu's spirit of the law, as I've come to realize, is just so crucial for a lot of anti-slavery thought in the third quarter of the 18th century that's not Quaker, that really challenges basically the legal foundations of slavery, narrows the grounds to one of, you know, basically, let's just admit it.

We hold slaves because it makes us wealthy and it's good for everybody but the slaves, right?

And so there's a whole set of other arguments that are starting to run in the third quarter of the 18th century.

But it's this Quaker deployment of natural rights discourse that's being used for other purposes that carries the anti-slavery message out into a wider arena and in a way that becomes difficult to ignore.

Yeah, so this is where we get into the crux of the matter about inevitability and contingency.

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