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by dodobirdlord
2301 days ago
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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. |
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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.