I didn't infer that he himself had something valuable to say on the subject, only that he suspects someone does, and laments their apparent reluctance to say it

I didn't infer that he himself had something valuable to say on the subject, only that he suspects someone does, and laments their apparent reluctance to say it. I think part of the source of this suspicion is that the abolition of slavery was a result of the Enlightenment and the rise of natural law as a source of ethics, and virtually every aspect of the West has abandoned natural law as a source of ethics or principle, leaving modern ethics in a drunkard's walk around the positions last reasoned to before that jettisoning.