Morality and Slavery in the past

Since my message seems to have been deleted automatically in the reddit post, here you go.
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So, I want you to imagine you have to make a choice.

Die free, or live a slave.

What do you pick?

Now, lets apply that same question to another person.

Kill someone (But they died free) or let them live (As a slave).

What do you pick?

(You dont actually need to answer).

The answer really boils down what you value the most, Life or Freedom?

If you have the philosophy that "Where there is life, there is hope" or, like the trolly problem, could not live with yourself for taking a life, then there are scenarios (Theoretical, not realistic) where you would agree that, Slavery is better.



So when we look in the past, and how slavery both came to be all over the world, and was a thing for a long time, its easy to hold the opinion that "Freedom and Free will is an intrinsic human experience and to violate that is evil", which is a fair take. But if you have to choose between Life and Free will, some people will pick Life.



Imagine two villages, each has say, 50 people, for a total of 100.

There's a famine, and there is only enough food for 50 people to barely survive the coming year.

What do the two villages do?

Lets assume that, Village A makes a move towards Village B, an act of war.

Lets assume that, Village B retroactively surrenders because they know they'll lose.

What do the people of A, do with the people of B?

If they leave them, then at best, most of them will slowly starve to death.

Maybe they'll resort to crime and banditry, committing crimes against them to regain food.

Maybe they'll start a war when they least expect it?

Okay, how about executing all of them to resolve the issue?

Or, capture them, and sell them off to a slaver. Doing so, arguably, justifies you spending resources to keep them alive while you transport them, making more than you spent.

Those 50 people ish, get to live, get fed, get hope of survival.

And your village gets the resources you need to live.

Win win right?

Or what if you reject slavery on principle, but the villagers of village B began to plead and beg for you to do it, to use your food to take and sell them as slaves, because they dont want to fight or starve?



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Now, I'm not saying this happened, when or where.

My point is that, from a theoretical discussion, its actually pretty easy to create realistic scenarios where a group of people enslave another group and believe it to be a genuinely morally right move.

Our biggest benefit, being in the modern world and a developed nation, is not being in a situation where that scenario is remotely plausible.

We're not forced to choose between Freedom or Life, at least, not in such an extreme way.

Think of the "Three laws of Robotics" from iRobot, or any such AI based movie / book.

The first one there is "A robot, through action or inaction, cannot allow a human come to harm."

Which is a nice sentiment, but the problem with it, is that the statement tries to put "Action" and "Inaction" on the same level. What happens if its put in a situation where both action and inaction cause harm to some degree / definition? It breaks.

Likewise, our modern day morals are allowed to exist, because we're not put into situations where they are challenged.

What would you do, if you were genuinely in a situation where your personal sense of right and wrong was challenged? Would you be able to make a choice? Would you freeze?

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I'm just glad I dont need to.

I can still look at specific instances of slavery and go, "That is / was wrong, even back then."

I can look at how, the system was abused, and how it developed negatively, until slaves weren't even fed because it was "Cheaper" to replace them every few days than it was to keep them fed.

Awful.

But at the same time, I can take the core concept of "Owning a human being" and not immediately denounce it as morally wrong for a person to have done it, because its all about what an individual and a people value, at the core of their beliefs. Life or Freedom?