238 SOCIAL REFORMHired Labor: the Profit/Harm Calculus
Yu argued that hired labor was a justified substitute for slavery because "the
custom of using hired labor and indentured servants was currently done by the
scholars and officials in China and working successfully."12^5 Yu admitted that
the adoption of hired labor in Korea would be vexing not only because slave-
owners were long accustomed to using slaves for labor and maltreating them in
the process, but also because arduous labor was associated with slavery and
regarded as demeaning by the commoner population. "Only if a person is a slave
do others make them labor [i.e., employers of labor only seek slaves], and only
if a person is a slave is he made to labor for others." Yet, despite the stigma
attached to hard labor, Yu acknowledged that there were still some people who
worked occasionally as hired laborers.
In any case, Yu argued that there were two ways to overcome the stigma against
hard physical labor. The first was the use of legislation to effect a transforma-
tion of ingrained social custom, contrary to the conventional view that customs
were impervious to transformation by law. I 26 He also believed it was possible
for the social elite or ruling class in society to change the manner in which it
treated the lower class. If the ruling class began to show benevolence and right-
eousness toward their inferiors, it would lift the hereditary restrictions and exces-
sive hardships imposed on slaves. Once this occurred, ordinary commoners would
be more than willing to hire themselves out as laborers.
But how was this moral transformation in the attitude of the upper class toward
slaves to take place? Not by the type of self-cultivation preached by the Neo-
Confucian moralists, but by the simple device of abolishing hereditary slavery.
Since legislated abolition would reduce the number of slaves in the population,
the reduction of the slave population would lead gradually to the conversion of
the rulers or slaveowners to benevolent and righteous treatment "as a matter of
course." In effect, he did not provide a feasible explanation of why this change
of attitude toward slaves should result so easily, but he was convinced that the
abolition of the hereditary feature would induce many men to become hired labor-
ers, even for their whole lives. This was a rather curious statement because the
hired laborers of Hamgyong Province had already become laborers not only for
life, but as a hereditary indentured class hardly different from slaves.^127
Nonetheless, Yu believed that the reduction in the number of slaves would
change the attitude of slaveowners, slaves, and commoners toward manual labor.
It would be the objective, external conditions that would achieve the conversion
of the inner mind, and not the other way around, as might be expected from a
Confucian philosopher.
In an even greater departure from Confucian moral orthodoxy, Yu argued that
a transformed external situation would ameliorate the external behavior of indi-
viduals not because of any influence on their innate moral capacities, but rather
because of an appeal to everyone's sense of self-interest. "All men throughout
the world since the most ancient times have shared the same feeling - to pursue