In response to Raanan's post "Comic Book Philosophizing" (January 27, 2012):
I would say that, regardless of the apparent nobility of the goal proposed by the comic book character, a revival of slavery would not be acceptable. His goal (to allow people to devote their time to philosophy, science, and the arts), while admirable, is possible to achieve in ways which do not involve the suffering of massive numbers of people. Implementing his suggestion of slavery might speed up the process, but I think the cost would be too high. After all, is improving the lives of some of the human population really worth drastically decreasing the quality of the lives of others? I would say not.
Furthermore, while the character's idea of determining who has to become slaves by lottery is certainly more fair than basing the decision off race, class, or something of the sort, it is very open to corruption. Even if we were to consider utilising such a technique to achieve a goal of this sort, it seems likely that rich people would bribe poorer people into taking their places in the lottery by offering to provide for the families of the poorer people, or some people would throw off the lottery by submitting some candidates more than once, or people would attempt to pay off whoever ran the lottery... the possibilities for corruption are numerous. Also, of course, I don't think that slavery (no matter how fairly distributed amongst the population, and not even with this admirable goal in mind) is justified.
Thank you for the comment. I was attempting to incite just this sort of thought and arguement. I agree with you but I pose this question. Does the relative fairness of the way choosing these slaves make it any more just. By that I mean, isn't it a red herring, missing the point that the concept of slavery itself is the moral issue, not who becomes a slave.
ReplyDelete