The master and slave are part of the same whole; one cannot exist without the other, and more generally, everyone is a flawed or incomplete person in one way or another. Having empathy for one without having empathy for the other is to misunderstand the universe.
Wouldn't #dualism be more appropriate with that explanation?
Because it would ascribe fundamental different properties to master and slave as beings that just might have been different opportunities at one point? I would think so, because the same "whole" seems arbitrary.
Have empathy for the slave. He is endowed with dignity by the Divine. Jesus Christ paid a price in blood to set him free from the bonds of sin. What God has freed, let no man return into bondage.
Have empathy for the master. Jesus died not only for the upright, not only for the oppressed, but for tax collecting thugs, prostitutes — even the murderer crucified beside him. He raised a saint from Saul of Tarsus. He died for the slave's master. Oh, yes, the master is undeserving, but none of us are deserving. If thou, O Lord, wilt mark iniquities, how should I stand?
But know what shape this empathy for the master takes. You must fear for his soul. If it is consumed by sin, he will be cast into perdition. He must well and truly repent, and his sin is grave.
As a bald statement explicit empathy would (perhaps correctly in a political context) be confused for endorsement. That does not imply a lack of empathy: https://m.dailykos.com/stories/2009/5/18/732785/-
(Ignore the partisan commentary please, I am only linking for the quotes which do demonstrate this.)
I certainly would. A little more empathy for slaveowners (that is, the ability to see things from their point of view) would have enabled the US to abolish slavery without the bloody civil war.
Every country in the western henisphere abolished slavery around about the same time, but only in the US did it cause a civil war.
This is a misunderstanding of American history. I don't fully know why it was so easy to do away with slavery in other parts of the world (and it mostly happened all within about 100 years of each other), but in the US, slavery was core to the economic system of the south - a slavocracy headed by white slavocrats.
The slavocrats would have been happy to have empathy, for the northerners to treat them softly and allow their system to persist. They were (not entirely happily) trading free state / slave state as new states were admitted to the union.
It was only when a fever pitch of abolition put the new Republican party in with Lincoln as president did the south finally decide it would be impossible to continue their system in co-existance with the industrialized free north. The capitalist free north also had an interest in liberating the slaves so they could be put to use as highly productive industrial workers instead of agricultural workers.
To this end, the south seceded from the union and fired the first blow against the north at Ft. Sumter. A brutal military campaign was necessary to break the power of the slavocracy and free the slaves.
You can look at the historical material interests of the north and conclude it wasn't entirely selfless, but by god it was necessary to end the evil endemic to the southern economic system.
The master and slave are part of the same whole; one cannot exist without the other, and more generally, everyone is a flawed or incomplete person in one way or another. Having empathy for one without having empathy for the other is to misunderstand the universe.