Does time mean owning people was OK?
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/king-no-president-owned-human-beings-honored-article-1.2998816
No, but their mindset was different in those days.
Many of the things we think of as right and wrong come from things we learn in society around us.
Once it was common to see Gay people as " wrong"
We look back with the benefit of hindsight.
The people living at that time didn't have that.
Not everyone has an independent moral code, most of it appears to be formed by the society we live in.
If that society suddenly says a group of people are responsible for our lack of wealth/demise it suddenly becomes ok to victimise them. It happens to us too. We call it propaganda. Which is just a form of " moral guidance" and an attempt to move us in a certain direction.
A lot of slave owners in the past, would not have thought about the inhumanity, because society and their lives told them it was ok, just like Nazi Germany thought it was ok to deal with the Jewish problem.
A lot of people don't realise how much the society around them influences their ethical choices, but it does.
Gay people didn't get equality or many rights until societies mindset had altered enough to allow it.
We may in the future be criticised for something we do, we just can't see it yet.
So those people who owned slaves were not really any worse than us, we have the benefit of society telling us it was wrong.
If you want examples, it's like castes in India believing the untouchables are...., well untouchable.
When people have a certain mindset, they don't see the harm that happens to others due to their attitude.
I wish in some ways I was blind to the fact that so much of our morals/ethics are dictated by influences around us, but it's everywhere.
People who behave with inhumanity, because society validates the inhumanity.
Unfortunately religion doesn't seem to change anything.
It's people.
So although I think slavery is always wrong, I recognise the age and attitude in which someone lives influences their actions.
Hitler used propaganda to make it ok to murder people, just like other governments all over the world use it.
It's a scary part of people, that they can be talked out of their humanity and not even be aware of it. Religion doesn't prevent it ( for all its claims of a fixed morality) sometimes it becomes a form of inhumanity in its own right.
Frightening, imo.
So I acknowledge the fact those presidents had slaves, but it was in a large part, the times in which they lived.