[ijpsud]

You're implicitly claiming that it's fair for me to enslave you so long as I end up giving you a better education than you otherwise would have had, for example.

So I could go to a poor country and enslave a bunch of people and train them up and get them to write code for my companies for several generations (all completely against their will - through physical force), and that would be fine with you?

We're trying to construct good incentives for the world here. Your system of incentives doesn't sound great to me.

[aww_dang]

I understand where you are coming from, but I feel you are comparing apples and oranges here.

Do you think that life was purely cake and candy for the western underclasses during the colonial period? Debtors prisons, work farms, indentured servitude, the list of _historical_ abuses goes on.

Yes, there were brutal practices in the past. This is true of both east and west. But the comparison you make implies (at least in my eyes) that you assume this brutality would have continued if colonialism had. The truth is that the west has been a driver and proponent of human rights reform.

The will to be introspective and self-critical has allowed the west to evolve. This same trait can be taken to an extreme of illogic which unduely dismisses the progress it has set the stage for.

The comparison is not between slavery (which we can all easily condemn) and freedom. A better comparison would be between the current western standards of sanitation and jurisprudence vs. the relatively undeveloped current conditions of many former colonies. That said, there are still plenty of reasons to oppose colonialism.

At the end of it all we are left with a choice between optimism and pessimism. Descendants of slaves can choose to count their blessings and appreciate the opportunities they have in their life while still being proud of their heritage. Alternatively we can pessimistically and regressively seek to relitigate the past and blame others for our situation.

Which choice empowers the individual and recognizes his agency? Which choice makes him a victim who must be granted redress by institutions?

Frankly, some of this guilt tripping smacks of condescending nobelesse oblige, although I appreciate that not everyone feels that way.

[ijpsud]

> Descendants of slaves can choose to count their blessings and appreciate the opportunities they have in their life while still being proud of their heritage. Alternatively we can pessimistically and regressively seek to relitigate the past and blame others for our situation.

That's a false dichotomy, I think. This issue is about neither of those things. It's about creating a system of incentives which we predict will create a better world in the long term.

An obviously-good incentive, so far as I can see, is "If you try to enslave a bunch of people, you'll have to pay for the negative externalities of that later".

One could perhaps argue that governments are too short-term oriented to care about the future costs of their actions (see climate change), but I'm hopeful that we're slowly moving towards a better world in this regard.

[aww_dang]

If that's your perspective, I think we can both agree that slavery has been abolished in the west for more than a century. This was done not for the incentives you reference, but due to the moral conscience of western societies.

However, Mauritania still has slavery on a private basis. Libya has slave markets. China and N. Korea have forced labor camps, despite the liberation theology of their political fore-bearers. These countries and slave owners are outside the bounds of any incentives you suggest.

Getting back to the point at hand, judging past abuses is pessimistic and regressive. Yes, slavery in the past was a terrible (although somewhat acceptable at the time) institution. But there are also advantages to being a descendant of a slave in the developed world rather than living in an impoverished country.

Judging the past by the standards of the present, for mistakes which have already been corrected is illogical in my view. It dismisses the possibility for Panglossian optimism, that we live in the best of all _possible_ worlds. It suggests that the struggles endured were not for the best.

It is cavalier to make such judgement. What else would have been possible? No slavery and no contact, thus no life in the developed west for millions? We can always point to an idealized vision of a purely altruistic contact between Europeans and Africans, but was that _possible_ under historical circumstances?

I must politely disagree. I find this line of judgement regressive. The incentives you suggest do nothing for current circumstances. They only narrowly apply where amends have already been made. On the grander scale they perpetuate a toxic culture of unending victimhood.

Finally, if colonialism were still active in Libya, then the aforementioned slave markets wouldn't exist. There's something of a contradiction between narratives here.