Personally, I think that humans, in general, are still growing up. I don't know if that makes the human race the equivalent of a teenager, or a twenty-something, or what.

As for deducing things, that isn't as easy as it sounds. People aren't as observant as you might think. And to realize that there's something wrong, a person has to see it.

Yes, they could have seen what was going on. But why would they have looked? They were fine.

And this has wandered away from velvetpage's original point, which is that being a slaveowner doesn't make that person evil. Born into an immature society, certainly. Blind to the wrongness, whether by ignorance, willful dehumanization, or some other method, absolutely.

But evil? Not necessarily. Assuming that a slaveowner is automatically evil paints a rather poor picture of some of the people that signed the American Declaration of Independence. They were good people, for their time. For our time, they would be considered evil. But they were wrong to hold slaves, in both times.

And the difference between evil and wrong is the difference between deliberate wrong, and unthinking wrong.