While the crews of slave ships surely tended to be somewhat self-selecting, it seems highly unlikely that they were all or mostly sociopaths. The reality is tha

While the crews of slave ships surely tended to be somewhat self-selecting, it seems highly unlikely that they were all or mostly sociopaths. The reality is that it's quite easy for a perfectly normal person to convince themselves that bad things that happen to a group of people of radically different physical appearance, culture, language and religion don't really count. When their society already has a cultural consensus to that effect, and when their job depends on it, it's ridiculously easy. The two universal and constant features of human nature are stupidity and evil. Radical evil is more or less always here now, but people always and everywhere choose to believe that it is only in the past or in the village over the next hill. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7445240 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7445240