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Bayesian's avatar

Congratulations on getting a response from Scott Alexander, whom (IIRC) you once described as one of your favorite writers (he is one of mine too).

I suspect that when you say that "the Egyptians built pyramids off the backs of slaves", you are speaking metaphorically (or hyperbolically?), since:

1) AFAIK it's pretty much universally believed among Egyptologists that the actual pyramid laborers were paid (Hollywood and their sources notwithstanding :) - archaeologists have even found some pay stubs, as it were - for a decent one page summary you could use [1] as a starting point); and

2) It _appears_, but mostly with indirect evidence, to be the case that the Old Kingdom (particularly the Fourth Dynasty, which was the height of pyramid building) had a relatively small number of slaves** as a fraction of their total economy, so even metaphorically saying the pyramids were indirectly built by slaves (via the slaves' contribution to the overall surplus which could then be applied to pyramid building) is an iffy proposition. But coming up with solid numbers (compared to e.g. later Bronze Age Mesopotamia) is still very much a work in progress. If you know of any relevant work from say the last twenty years I would love to see some links.

** The Fourth Dynasty as it turns out is in fact when there starts to be evidence, generally written rather than material evidence, of numbers of what we might reasonably call "slaves";

prisoners of war mostly - Sneferu, the first pharoah of the Fourth Dynasty, father of Khufu aka Cheops, both:

1) made significant improvements in pyramid construction (although step pyramids predated his reign by quite a while); and

2) seems to have been (but beware of evidentiary survivorship bias) the first pharoah to engage in warfare at least partly for explicit purpose of gaining POWs for slave labor.

TL;DR - the big Fourth Dynasty pyramids might indirectly have required slave labor, but that claim has to be consider "not proven" so far.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/jan/11/great-pyramid-tombs-slaves-egypt

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Gaudium's avatar

You’re badly misreading Nietzsche if you see Utilitarianism as a synthesis of slave morality and master morality. Nietzsche was openly and explicitly contemptuous of utilitarianism, which he critiqued as a futile attempt to reconstruct Christian ethics in a world in where the Christian God is dead. For Nietzsche, utilitarianism is a misleading rationalization of received, unexamined slave morality.

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