[StanislavPetrov]

Perhaps what's "rational" in a purely economic sense isn't whats best for the nation or for society. In an economic sense, you could make an argument that slavery is "rational" as far as profits for slaveholders are concerned, but we don't allow slavery because its wrong and immoral despite the potential economic benefits to certain vested interests. Similarly, perhaps its time that we as a society reevaluated our reliance on health care delivery systems that base their agenda on outcomes that are economically profitable for them, rather than what is desirable for our society as a whole.

[roenxi]

Slavery is economically irrational. The risk of losing a William Deming or a Tim Cook because they were enslaved is far more damaging than the benefits of guaranteed cheap manual labour. We have an economy where a 1 in 100 worker is much more productive than the other 99 if they are allowed to make their own decisions about where they contribute. Funnily enough; the people with moral objections to slavery gained ascendancy at roughly the same time it became economically irrational. And started winning wars against slavery-tolerant societies because slave-based economies couldn't possibly compete with technology and industrial processes in the hands of free people.

[dodobirdlord]

Slavery, really? Besides, totally beside the point. The argument for rationality isn't that if we exclude the people who experience downside, maybe it's a net positive (always true by tautology), but rather that maybe even counting the people who experience the downsides it's still rational. The novel coronavirus is likely to end the lives of a lot of elderly people, but the majority of elderly people are going to have their lives ended by cancer or heart disease. Perhaps, even with the threat of pathogens like the novel coronavirus lurking to strike, it still makes sense to put most of our resources toward researching cancer and heart disease.

[geofft]

Yes, slavery, really. Rational actors today engage in slavery. https://venturebeat.com/2020/03/02/apple-foxconn-and-81-othe...

And you can construct a "rational" argument for it: the slaves are living under an oppressive government anyway and apparently nobody is going to intervene, so if they're stuck in internment camps, may as well give them something to do with their time. Sure, they don't have freedom, but they weren't going to have it anyway, so it's still rational. Right?

In seriousness - if you don't take into account the economic reliance on slavery that jurisdictions with legal slavery (e.g., the US South in the 1800s) had, and you claim it's solely that irrational slaveholders saw certain people as less than human in the abstract, you've missed a good part of the explanation and risk inaccurately understanding how to prevent it from happening again. People had a strong economic incentive to come up with justifications for their objectively immoral actions.