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

Oh, and it just so happens to serve our economic interests as well.

There's a whole sort of series of ways that slavery gets disguised in the 19th century where you have functional slavery without legal slavery.

And at the same time, there is a kind of a celebration of, see, we abolished it.

There's no more slavery anymore, even though things that are almost indistinguishable

are operating under the same cover.

So I just think that there's a certain amount of vigilance that we need against guarding, both guarding against our worst instincts as individuals and as societies, and a certain amount of humility to me about when we are sure of our moral purposes,

Where our blind spots lie.

What is it that we are not noticing?

What damage might we be doing in the service of improving things?

And that's not to say that we should not be... I mean, obviously, one aspect of the record of the modern era is of great damage done in pursuit of worthy causes.

And there is also...

extraordinarily worthy causes where there is real progress, there is real change.

One of the things I sometimes say in class is that the fact of the matter is that on the subject of slavery, there is no question about human progress over the last 200 years.

I mean, this is indisputable.

There is no place on the planet right now where slavery is legal.

Now, there are lots of places where slavery operates, but everybody who's doing it has to do it underground, right?

So this is an unqualified good.

I mean, this is real progress.

And yet at the same time, I can tell you that in the name of abolishing slavery, a whole lot of other stuff happened that brought new evils to the world.

You know, we could play this with almost anything.

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