Question: Slavery

Can slavery be done in such a way as to not be evil, by even the whitest of knights standards? I'm thinking along the lines of, "Which land would you rather live in? A land that when you can no longer financially provide for your family you are shit out of luck and wind up in debt to the government for the rest of your life. And possibly even have to watch the government evict your family from your own home, your spouse and children wind up homeless living on the streets, and you in prison for the rest of your life. Or, would you rather live in a land where if you can no longer financially provide for your family you can sell yourself into slavery to give them the financial means to support themselves, in which case-

>no individual under the age of 18 years can be sold, bought, or owned as a slave
>your master is legally required to clothe you appropriately (thicker/warmer clothes in the winter, the access/resources to wash them regularly, new fresh clothes when old clothes are worn out, etc.)
>your master is legally required to provide rooming/housing appropriately (bed, bedding, no leaking roof, proper door/shutters to block out wind/rain, a place for a fire plus fuel for the winter, etc.)
>your master is legally required to provide proper sustenance such as food and water appropriately (three square meals a day, etc.)
>your master is legally required to educate you in basic reading, writing, and math
>the government can not use your status as a slave to steal the land/possessions you once had as a free person, all of that which once belonged to you becomes the possessions of your next of kin, or if you have no kin, the person you deem most appropriate if they consent until such time that you have worked off the sum of money that your master paid for you and thus regain your freedom and possessions
>your master is legally required to respect your right to consent, if you do not wish to have sexual conduct with your master, work in a brothel, sexually service guests of your master, or fellow slaves/workers in the employ of your master, then you have the right to say no, and your master must respect that right
>if you are the victim of a violent assault upon your body, or have been violated in a sexual matter your master is legally required to give you access to full legal representation as the matter is investigated by the full extent of the law, equal to any investigation of a free person
>if you are struck with any kind of illness that is a significant risk to your health and well being then your master is legally required to give you full access to any and all methods of treatment as well as healers necessary to make a full recovery

What do you think Veeky Forums? Is it possible to spin slavery as the lesser evil? Or is this just a pipe dream?

I was even thinking of middle to lower class people using it as a potential pipeline for higher education, can't afford to go to a fancy shmancy college or university? Sell yourself to the best damn blacksmith or carpenter in the whole damn city, and BAM! Three years later you own your own smithy or woodshop in a comfy little town in a quaint neck of the country.

What you're describing is debtor slavery and indentured servitude, which can give rise to any and all other forms.

Laws could be put in place that prevent families from selling their children into slavery to pay debts........... or maybe they won't be put in place.

And then again there's a reason they call them "wage slaves". Slaves can be fed and sheltered after all, and if we're going to go that route is it really freedom when you live in shelters on your job site and can only shop at the Company Store, because they only pay you in the Company's own money? Is it really not freedom? Either way why distinguish between a Company and a Nation.

People can be slaves, for a variety of reasons and to a variety of different degrees. What matters is if they are treated like slaves. Does society at large regard them as "different".
If they're calling them slaves, then the answer is likely yes. That is very, very hard to make squeaky clean, and very hard to keep from getting dirtier than it already is at whatever level it's already at.

You can have totally moral slavery easily, just don't treat them like slaves.
That's the kind of slavery we all practice every day.

Alternatively you could write up a fantasy species that has a relationship with other sentients not unlike the symbiotic relationships between other animals in nature, where different mutual beneficial roles are taken on, and allow nature and time to make slavery of it. It's not evil because both species are honestly better off with that arrangement, and trying to do it differently would literally hurt the slaves and could crash and burn their species' survivability over the long term.

you can spin /anything/ as the lesser evil as long as the alternative is a really big evil. "Would you rather eat a bucket of shit or get raped to death by dickwolves", hmmm i guess eating shit isn't bad now good job user

This is a bit of a philosophical question I think so people may hold different opinions. Here's mine:

Slavery can never be good because you are reducing a sentient being to chattel. To deprive someone of their humanity is utterly evil and that's all there is to it.

You can have a tightly regulated system of slavery and that might be a step up from "regular" slavery, but it's not something you could make good. It's like human sacrifice. Maybe it's undertaken for some sort of utilitarian reason or it's done really humanely, but you're still killing a person. You could make slavery a lesser evil, but it will always be evil. Based on the set of rules you made what you're really talking about is indentured servitude, where someone becomes legally bound to the will of another. Their contract or services might have some value, but the person isn't actual property. That I don't think is evil by default in the way that slavery is.

Affording them certain basic rights, to start.

Thats an indentured maid, not a slave.

>Laws could be put in place that prevent families from selling their children into slavery to pay debts........... or maybe they won't be put in place.

Yes, that's why the first line I wrote up in my second post is that no one under 18 can be bought, sold, or owned as a slave. I probably should have taken that to the logical conclusion and included that you can't sell OTHER people as slaves. You can only sell YOURSELF into slavery for various reasons.

Thank you for bringing that up, I enjoyed the rest of your post, it's really making me think of how a government would try to regulate it to prevent as much abuse of the system as possible. Maybe I can even make it a quest or two, where the PCs have to investigate some shady ass individuals who see their slaves as nothing more than mindless beasts of burden. And not individuals who fell on hard times and are just trying to keep their loved ones off of the streets.

Nice dubs, and yes, that's what made me ask this question. Which is worse, calling someone master so that your family can keep the roof over their heads, food on the table, clothes on their back, or being free while huddling under a bridge in the pouring rain while eating food scavenged from a refuse pile and hoping you're not about to bite into a hidden turd nugget?

If you cut out the education part that's just a wife.

Nice one.

I suppose certain forms of indentured servitude can be acceptable. But they'd require a great deal of bureaucracy to make work.
Essentially, you need all of thisplus some sort of trusted central authority which checks in on the slaves to ensure that the rules are being followed and allow the slave a chance to bring grievances against their master to bear. I imagine there would a central "Servant's Rights Authority" or something similar, that visits slave holding households once every four months or so. An SRA agent has the right to terminate a contract on the spot if they feel the Servants are being ill-treated. They also keep an authoritative copy of every contract signed between an indentured servant and a master, which can be interpreted for illiterate slaves and is used to ensure that the Master is keeping within contract.

It might be also useful to expand on what a master can expect of you:
>You do not have freedom of movement. You may only travel with your master's permission.
>You must provide 8 hours of direct service to your master every day, at their discretion, though you are entitled to 8 hours of uninterrupted time to sleep/rest, situation permitting.
>You must be at all times obedient and servile, except in cases where doing so violates the earlier stipulations. You may not express opinions to freemen without your master's permission, nor join demonstrations or rallies without same.
>You may not bear arms without your master's permission.

Basically, you'd be an indentured servant but with a lot of legal protections in place to prevent your abuse. I'm not sure how economically viable it would wind up being, really.

>Can slavery be done in such a way as to not be evil, by even the whitest of knights standards?
Fantasy races literally incapable of making major decisions.
>Race is strong, smart, and social
>Unfortunately they are terrible at making decisions
>Deciding simple things can take excruciatingly long (takes them 2 hours to decide what to eat for lunch)
>Important decisions can take impractically long (deciding on a college major takes 9 years)
>By being slaves major decisions can be put on the shoulders of others
>They have no problem with being slaves or being forced down a specific path in life

But practically speaking no, you cannot make slavery expressly good, you can make it acceptable, logical, or neutral, but it isn't good in the same sense as feeding the poor or raising orphans.

>Can slavery be done in such a way as to not be evil, by even the whitest of knights standards?
Just change the whitest of knights standards instead of slavery itself.

Yeah, prisoners.

Isn't slavery/indentured servitude a medieval/fantasy governments version of welfare?

>we will give you free food, free housing, free medicine, etc.
>in exchange you will live where we choose, work a certain amount of hours each day, at the job site we choose

What's the difference between living in your masters house and eating his food, and living in a house that a modern day government built and eating the governments food via foodstamps?

I did this once. A race of summoned creatures who by divine fiat were incapable of living except as slaves. Can say yes, but can't say no. Absent the gestalt of slavery they can't even rationalize eating to sustain themselves. Due to the nature of their creation the only good thing to do is to enslave them, the tricky part was what you did with them next is all.

Let me make a gentle suggestion, please. Right now what you have is a Blacklist. You write on it all the things that a master can not do. The presumption, at that point, is that a master can do Absolutely Anything Else. ABSOLUTELY. Anything else.

If you're hedging your bets and especially if you're going to be playing this with a real group who will be dealing with these rules, you might find it more gratifying in the end to use a Whitelist instead. This is the list of rules, these are the things that a master Can do, and the presumption under law is that the master can do Absolutely Nothing Else.

This is wildly less tempting to abuse and when it is abused you can typically have a much better idea of where it's coming from and how far it can actually go.
It also has the advantage of spelling out and making immediately apparent exactly why anyone would want to own a slave and what they get out of it.
Appending a bill of rights is also easy, it's just a matter of saying "A Master Can" or "A Master WILL"

>assume slavery is evil

how about it simply isn't 2017 North America/Europe in your fantasy game

>If you're hedging your bets and especially if you're going to be playing this with a real group who will be dealing with these rules, you might find it more gratifying in the end to use a Whitelist instead. This is the list of rules, these are the things that a master Can do, and the presumption under law is that the master can do Absolutely Nothing Else.

This is an excellent suggestions, thank you! Exactly the kind of content I was looking for when I posted this thread.

I know right, there are a lot of advantages to slavery, you don't have to be homeless, your family and loved ones don't have to be in debt, you can even use it to your advantage to make an awesome career. Just look at the gladiators of ancient Rome and Greece!

Like I said here it can be a pipleline for higher education for those who are not financially well off. Sell yourself to a glassblower, blacksmith, butcher/tanner, potterer, carpenter, stonemason, brick maker/layer, herbalist/healer, scribe, any and all master craftsman. By the time you've worked off the amount of money they paid for you then you are already a novice craftsman or even an apprentice.

In ancient medieval days, or their fantasy equivalent, that would be a fucking huge blessing to all of the street urchins living in poverty. Not only do you get a nice lump sum of cash to hand to your parents so they can (hopefully) move out of that mud and stick hovel and into a real home, but you also gain an education that normally would never be available to someone of your social status.

It's an excellent way to invest in the middle class and economy, as well as reduce the number of homeless/those in financial debt.

That's not how welfare works.

>assume slavery is good because you can't fathom that ancient Rome and the main greek city states would be objectively evil
Rome's politics are basically the epitome of an evil state as far as D&D alignments go, slavery is just icing on the cake.

Slavery will always be evil but it can be necessary and practical. The idea that freedom is always good is ingrained in western society, but values like community or life can be directly opposed to freedom and right for it.

A firmly good character fighting for slavery might just know that his society can't prosper without it. The top of the country may not be much better off than the bottom, and paying workers would put power into foreign traders when feeding and sheltering slaves will help everyone live better.

Star Treck, isn't that the Marxist dream fiction future?

>community or life
Slavery is also against both of those, and destroys both community and life. There's a reason the vast majority of slavery is either aimed at underclasses or the conquered.

Also your good is at most neutral if not still evil.

Guys...


In a world where Orcs, huge, brutish, idiotic and fast breeding humanoids exist, would you bother enslaving your fellow man at all?

You'd be doing them a favor really, considering their raider cultures rely on your own for food anyhow its really just the next step of their parasitic existence to be dragged kicking and screaming into the fold and used as the livestock they are.

The average orc's quality of life would be drastically improved by being enslaved.

>Can slavery be done in such a way as to not be evil
No, and we've been over it thousands of times.

>no individual under the age of 18 years can be sold, bought, or owned as a slave
>your master is legally required to educate you in basic reading, writing, and math
>the government can not use your status as a slave to steal the land/possessions you once had as a free person, all of that which once belonged to you becomes the possessions of your next of kin, or if you have no kin, the person you deem most appropriate if they consent until such time that you have worked off the sum of money that your master paid for you and thus regain your freedom and possessions
>your master is legally required to respect your right to consent, if you do not wish to have sexual conduct with your master, work in a brothel, sexually service guests of your master, or fellow slaves/workers in the employ of your master, then you have the right to say no, and your master must respect that right
>if you are the victim of a violent assault upon your body, or have been violated in a sexual matter your master is legally required to give you access to full legal representation as the matter is investigated by the full extent of the law, equal to any investigation of a free person

>those huns are sure angry, maybe we should enslave a few more, it's not like they have feelings
>also there's this guy who wants to see the emperor, name's Attila

What would be the incentive to take slaved in such a system, when you could just hire a person to benefit from their work and have less obligations towards them? Slavery like that is not cost effective, the main reason behind slavery in the first place.

Yeah yeah dehumanization and whatnot, but its provable fact that orcs aren't human and don't have the same level of intellect and live shorter lives, you could bring them under the yoke in under a generation. Its like they were MADE for this.

I see people talking about slaves having to be over 18, but how about the opposite? I don't mean to be edgy, but couldn't we look at something like military school as a kind of slavery? You aren't allowed to leave. You are forced to do things that you (probably) hate. And you aren't given much freedom. (Disclaimer: I don't know much about military school beyond the pop culture portrayals)

What if slavery was more like an apprenticeship where a child between 12 and let's say 21 had to serve a term of service to some sort of master. Not necessarily military, but someone who would train them. But because not every adult is a master and because the population grows and because a master doesn't want to spend all day with his/her brats, maybe they are "owned" by a society/plantation type of thing rather than an individual.

And they still have rights to food, shelter, health, and education (which is part of their slavery) and inspections are carried out every five years or so on established facilities and every couple months for new ones (or ones that are under probation).

On the other hand, I think that this almost changes slavery to the point where it's no longer even recognizable. Especially because the slaves can leave after a certain point. But it is compulsory, the slaves can't leave whenever they want, and they lose many of their rights (keeping the four listed above).

Pretty much. Slavery is essentially possible as a system if you essentially consider a whole class of beings as resources to be exploited until death, whether it's in a roman mine or in a plantation in the tropical parts of the americas

Small scale, household slavery/servant overlap is about the only way to sort of make it a neutral idea.

Military schools are shitholes where shitty parents send kids they don't actually like but don't have the courage to just let them emancipate because it would reflect badly on the family. Nothing good about this.

Waiting till a slave is over eighteen is /bad/, you're allowing them a chance to grow as a person before wrenching that away from them.

Ethical slavery aka domestication starts from birth.

Selling yourself to slavery would be tempting option in a society like Drow or Dark Eldar, because it would mean you have at least some worth as someone else's property. On your own you could be killed at any time for fun, without any repercussions. Become cattle to be safe from the wolves, so to speak.

Sounds like someone was a shitty kid whose parents didn't like them.

I don't buy that most parents would really spend $30-40,000 dollars a year on tuition and board (the average cost of raising a child at home is $10,000 a year). They would only do that if a) they genuinely wanted the child to learn to be a better person b) they were so fantastically wealthy that $20,000 is chump change to them

1.0: The process of enslaving an individual must follow the principles below (described in 2.0 and 2.1), and be evaluated by a council of non-associated, appointed citizen from the country.

2.0: Any action taken against an enslaved individual (including the one described in 1.0) must be approved by the individual beforehand.
2.1: The individual must not be forced or coerced into approving these actions.

3.0: Complaint of improper treatment / failure to meet these requirements can be submitted to a council of non-associated, appointed citizen from the country.
3.1: This council will decide whether or not the slave should be relieved of its position as a slave, and / or if the previous owner should be punished. A seperate entity will decide such a punishment, as per the country's laws.
3.2: All slave owners must be visited once per year by a non-associated, appointed citizen of the country who will accept anonymous information from any slaves owned by the slaver, and bring it back to the council.
3.3: If the slave is afraid of being unapprovenly punished by its master, they will be escorted to a safe location.

That said, this is not exactly slavery.

No one sells themselves into slavery, user.

>these slaves have more rights than most Americans

You understand the difference between liberties and rights, right? I don't think any modern nation protects all the rights listed (especially the clothing one), but that post said nothing about what liberties the slaves enjoy. Presumably they get virtually none.

Oh there's rights the slaves
>enjoy
remove all rights at once!

If you're talking about D&D, it operates on a morality that is objective within the setting.

Within D&D, slavery is objectively evil.

Just live with it.

Slavery isn't evil, it's welfare.

>Be too poor to feed Kid
>Kid is a beautiful young girl
>Girl can die in the gutter
>Girl can become part of the king's harem where she will be treated like a princess

Which one do you pick?

Too much bullshit in these rules.

Slaves used to cost as much to own as a car does today. They were not cheap things and had a constant upkeep of money and resources. You're not going to constantly beat the shit out of someone you paid a fortune for, it's illogical to do so and harms your ability to make money in the future.

The medical one is the world's biggest con waiting to happen. Little Tyrone goes to Mama Shaniqua every week, she says he has dick rot and needs $1,000 or he'll die. Little Tyrone gets it and then next week the dick rot magically returns and he needs it all over again.

What your listing is a liberal wet dream of stupidity that doesn't function the moment you add human nature to the scenario. You don't need to force people to educate their slaves, you educate your slave to read so they can use the tools they need properly by reading the instructions. You teach them to read and write so they can make inventory lists and go shopping for them.

But that's wrong. Examination of the remains of Egyptian slaves that were used to build the pyramids has proven that they were very well taken care of. Broken bones were set and well mended, rotting teeth removed, they didn't suffer too terribly from malnutrition.

Was their life a piece of cake? Hell no, that was ancient Egypt, they didn't have things like x rays and ultra sounds and antibiotics. But for that time period? They received medicinal care equal to that of any free person.

And it makes perfect sense, if your livelihood depends on a draft horse, are you going to let it get sick and die? Starve it to death to save a few bucks? Hell no, you take damn good care of that horse. So why wouldn't a slave owner do the same for their slaves?

It happens all the time in the world. What, you think slavery died out when America had a civil war? Hell no, it continued on and is still happening today, as you read this very post.

WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU PLACE A PERSON IN A LOWER GRADE CATEGORY?

Why don't you just give them the money?

>You're not going to constantly beat the shit out of someone you paid a fortune for, it's illogical to do so and harms your ability to make money in the future.
user, early pictures of freedmen show their backs twisted with scar tissue from whips.
Testimony from several famous freedmen speak of beatings that were both common and varying levels of severe.
You do know that being whipped, while painful, is rarely lethal, right?
Ignoring how most of your post is /pol/ bait, anyway, your ignorance is put on display.

The world is fuck up. I'm not justifying crime currently. I'm justifying the criminality of slavery.

*fucked up

You do realize your accounts are coming from a victor's point of view correct? The people who claim Slavery is pure evil no matter what are obviously not going to point out the reality for most slaves but will happily find the guy who refuses to work but wants all the food and shelter from it any way.

>I don't have an argument so I call it /pol/ bait.

The reality that they're confined to another person's will? Unlike a job you can walk out of?

Yeah that's evil.

But, I put a beret on mine?

You're always confined to another person's will. Only an idiot thinks freedom exists. You are only ever as free as the mighty decide you get to be, so if you're living in a first world country you're a slave to someone else's will.

> Egyptian slaves that were used to build the pyramids

Only if you stick yourself into a mental prison. I'm not confined to anyone's will. This is the fault of every criminal, they think it happened to them, and while it hurt, it's only sensible to do it to someone else.

>I call it /pol/ bait.
>You're not going to constantly beat the shit out of someone you paid a fortune for, it's illogical to do so and harms your ability to make money in the future.
>A lie
>Little Tyrone goes to Mama Shaniqua
> liberal wet dream
It's almost cute.
>You do realize your accounts are coming from a victor's point of view correct?
>Actual photographs, that you can see in history museums, don't exist
>The many self published stories by freedmen and escaped slaves well before the Civil War detailing their lives don't exist
>tries to apply an -ism incorrectly

The government of your country takes your money by force and lets you live under it. You clearly have no grasp of how power works and what hierarchy is.

If you're so free then why don't you walk into the nearest store and start pissing on all of the products that are up for sale.

No?

Guess you're not so free after all.

Ancient Greek slavery wasn't evil.

>no individual under the age of 18 years can be sold, bought, or owned as a slave
This is stupid and absurd.

Hierarchy elevates people in their minds. Only those in the hierarchy believe they are higher.

>I'm upset by the names you used so I'll ignore your points and continue to act smug with no self awareness.

I couldn't piss on the store floor, because I don't want to. If I really had to, I'd just do it and escape the law as best I could. I'm still free to do it.

>Engage my shoestring strawman points please!
No, user, it's enough that I'm wasting my time typing back to you, now school is starting soon, put your phone away.

Why? If slavery is ethical and doesn't involve dehumanizing the slaves, then of course the first thing you'd do is make damn sure no child could be forced into it.

No sane person would want a kiddie sex slave ring in their hometown.

>I couldn't piss on the store floor, because I don't want to. If I really had to, I'd just do it and escape the law as best I could. I'm still free to do it.
>I'd just do it and escape the law as best I could.
>I'm still free to do it.
>escape the law as best I could.

Tell me user, how a slave running from his master for pissing all over his masters kitchen floor is any different from you "escaping the law as best I could" due to pissing on the store floor?

You are not as free as you think you are.

>If I ignore his argument and continue to act like a liberal it will show everyone how I'm totally right to ignore them.

:)

18 is too old to be considered a child. By the time you're 14 you're developed enough to take care of yourself outside of a sick society that treats it's young adults like they're still toddlers.

Well, if I had to piss on the floor, I would run from the law but I wouldn't question that the law was there for good.

A slave running from his master's cockgoblin kitchen knows the slavery law is for evil. Because the slave master had him in chains, and the store owner didn't keep me in chains.

I'm free as a bird.

>muh victors writing history
Look you dumbass secesh, if you wanted one war above all that put the lie to that adage, it's the fucking civil war. It took less than 4 years for the south to start pushing bullshit as the truth about the way. It took almost a century for people to actually pay attention to what southern leaders were themselves saying before and during the war rather than their own fucking self-serving justifications post facto or those of their children.

>being worked to death in a mine isn't evil
Aristotle is LE.

One of the main issues with the alignment system is where it's calibrated; Gygax assumed most societies were Neutral at worst.

Mines and latifundias were, for thousands of years, visions of hell in the minds of just about anyone who visited these shitholes, and their owners were perfectly entitled by the law they themselves put in place to act that way.

It's evil, but it's a societally approved evil.

Slavery will never be acceptable to most white knights and extreme moralfags, the best you can do is not include it if you know that a person will ha v extreme hangups about it.
Other than that, just make it work with the setting you build - if you have barbarian raiders, obviously it will be chattel slavery, if you have an empire, it will be a different kind of slavery.

>moralfag
You're a child

>moralfag
You're a child

I really hoped that I wouldn't have to explain it, but here we go:

- 18 as a cutoff age makes no sense before the 20th century, and even in the most coddling societies there are still caveats allowing people younger than 18 to do anything outside of prostitution.
- If you do not want minors to be sexually exploited by predators, ban that. Isn't it already?
- If slavery is designed to provide a last resort to those who have none, then children need it the most. It's like a law that says you can only adopt people who are 18 or older.
- Related to the point above, but children are the ones who are most exploited and preyed upon if they must work for a wage. Most child laborers in the 19th century did not even "earn their own bread" and their boss tricked them and treated them like dirt. Ethical slavery would be a clear improvement over that.
- Your children and wards are essentially your slaves already, both legally and practically. For them, being sold into slavery is more like a change of guardians than a change of status.
- It is less traumatic for a child to grow up in slavery than for an adult to be sold into it.
- If you're caring so much for slaves, you want to buy children who will learn and train during their youth so they can be maximally productive in adulthood.
- So all slaves are adults but "your master is legally required to educate you in basic reading, writing, and maths" ? Why isn't the state/church/whatever doing that anyway, and why should the masters, especially since adults apparently do not need it to function in society?
- What happens to the children whose relatives are enslaved?

I could go on forever but I don't want to waste any more time on stupid ideas.

Children are not slaves. Where did you grow up?
You're not allowed to keep children in chains.

Both of these posts have excellent points, honestly I never thought about it like that. I was thinking more along the lines of making sure what happened in the U.S. before child labor laws were invented wouldn't happen in my setting.

>I could go on forever but I don't want to waste any more time on stupid ideas.

And having said as much, he turned his back on Veeky Forums forever.

Yes the latter is a much lesser evil. At the end of the day slavery is better than starving to death with your children and this was the norm was thousands of years even up to the Workhouses of the late 1800s if not even later.

>You're not allowed to keep children in chains.
You don't even NEED to do that, even if most cultures never frowned upon chaining or caging your weaker relatives too much.
Also a system where you can keep your slave in chains but you are also obligated to give him such good treatment that european welfare states would applaud is just schizophrenic. Scandinavian prisons don't keep people in chains.

Stop playing with alignment. It's poisoning your brain.

If you treat slavery like a sort of adoption system with the usual safeguards (screening out abusive owners, periodically checking that the slave is healthy and treated according to the legal provisions etc) there is little risk for abuse, or little more than actual adoption at any rate.

it's possible to conceive of slavery as an ideal and to conceive of a society morally premised on that ideal

the failure to live up to an ideal or the potential of abusing it does not necessarily tarnish the odeal itself

You know what's stupid, arguing for physical confinement.

...

You nearly said it yourself,
>ordeal

We could imagine such a society creating a sort of unified "ward protection services" to make sure your legal dependents are treated properly. This is a broad category covering slaves, minors and those suffering from mental problems (insanity, retardation, senility) and the physically crippled. Anyone who has a guardian or caretaker needs supervision to make sure the guardian isn't abusing his power over him after all.

Well, physical confinement makes some sense for hardened criminals, not so much for slaves in modern society, and not at all for children.

Any time you need to write so much, to figure out the good of something that no one will read it. You know it's not right.

so long as we're free associating - trial by ordeal

folks ITT are trying to show that slavery can be safe and comfortable, which is different from whether it is moral

a LG god could impose a caste system entailing slavery, where the wicked are punished by reincarnating as slaves who can then work dutifully to pay the debt of their past lives and reincarnate as freeborn

You're not my dad! You can't tell me what to do! >:(

You're not making slavery good or even neutral with situations like this, you are simply making it the lesser evil.

Which is still the lesser EVIL.

Yeah, you don't have to work for welfare.

Comfort requires all the senses.

People with crappy(tm) jobs enjoy their crappy jobs because they choose to do them and can leave. They don't need the money, they choose to use the money. No-one needs money enough to be enslaved for it, especially not the strong free people of Africa, who don't even know what a Book is.

>People with crappy(tm) jobs enjoy their crappy jobs
kek

>What's the difference between living in your masters house and eating his food, and living in a house that a modern day government built and eating the governments food via foodstamps?
You have a choice with welfare, slavery expressly gives you no choice.

Your society does not seem like it needs slaves. These slaves seem to be more of a luxury than a necessity - to me there's no reason why anyone would bother to keep them, outside of keeping them as courtesans or spies or something.

Paid servants require much less upkeep and responsibility, and you don't have to worry as much that they might revolt against you if you piss them off. They could just find someplace else to work. That constant paranoia made a lot of slave owners more cruel than they might have been.

You're also still a person.

Chattel slavery is just one form of slavery, which really only came about towards the end of the slave Era.
In older instances you will still seen as human, you were just the bottom of the social ladder and seen pretty much as hobos are now.