What makes us so certain we would have been on the right side of history?

Most people today condemn slavery without hesitation. But condemning an injustice after generations of resistance, testimony, scholarship, and moral progress is not the same as recognizing - and opposing - it while it is still protected by law, custom, religion, economics, family, and social approval.

You Would Have Owned Slaves challenges the comforting belief that we would automatically have been among history's moral heroes.

Drawing on the history of Atlantic chattel slavery, abolition, resistance, psychology, moral philosophy, and social influence, Rayford Aquirre examines the forces that shape what people accept as normal - and the limits of our confidence about who we would have been in another century.

The book does not argue that every reader would literally have owned enslaved people. Instead, it asks a more difficult question: what evidence do we actually have that we would have resisted an injustice when resistance carried a real cost?

From slave markets and households to abolitionists, freedom seekers, institutions, moral luck, conformity, and modern blind spots, the argument ultimately turns away from the past and toward the present.

Because the most important question is not whether you would have recognized yesterday's injustice.

It is whether you can recognize today's before history makes the answer obvious.