Thoroughgoing liberalism, on the other hand, permits people to make self-damaging decisions so long as others are not directly and significantly harmed (as Mill himself agreed, about cases other than voluntary slavery). So even if we agree, for the sake of argument, that freely entering into slavery would necessarily damage the slave’s interests overall, we still would not thereby be compelled to accept, from a strong liberal perspective, that such acts should be impermissible. But in any case (as we’ve seen and will expand on later) there are good reasons to suppose that voluntary enslavement may be for some people the best choice in terms of their overall interests, given their available alternatives.
The crucial point, however, is this: if individual freedom is a basic right, and if personal autonomy is an intrinsic good for human beings, then people must be allowed the scope to make life-changing, risk-taking, freedom-restricting, life-damaging and even life-ruining decisions. This is part of what it means to be a free and autonomous agent. To interfere in an individual’s choice to become a slave, therefore, would be to treat him in a manner inconsistent with respect for him as an autonomous agent. So the institution of voluntary slavery would not deny overall freedom to the slaves; on the contrary, it would respect their personal autonomy as expressed in their initial choices.
2. Since, under this proposal, slaves would mainly be recruited from the underclass, slavery contracts would not be agreements between free and equal partners. Many poor people would be more-or-less forced by their impoverished circumstances into slavery. Most decisions to enter slavery would fall so far short of ideal or full voluntariness as to be, essentially, nonvoluntary. They would be compelled by imposed social conditions, hence unfree and unfair.
True, a perfectly voluntary agreement is one between parties who are equally in possession of the relevant facts, who have equally unclouded judgement, and who are equal in freedom, power and status. Slavery agreements fall short of this ideal. They would not be agreements between parties initially equal in resources and power. The slave option would appeal mostly to the poor and marginalised members of our societies, and slave-ownership would only be possible for the economically comfortable and secure, so that potential slaves and slave-owners would usually be occupants of highly unequal socio-economic positions. An agreement to slavery would be an agreement by the poor to accept a ‘lesser evil’ from the rich. However it doesn’t follow from the fact that slavery agreements would be less than ideally voluntary that they cannot be sufficiently voluntary to warrant respect as morally and legally binding commitments. It cannot be the case that any decision falling short of perfect voluntariness must be made under duress – any more than anything falling short of the perfectly circular must be non-circular. Political arrangements that are not perfectly democratic may nevertheless warrant acceptance as democratically legitimate. So, too, individual choices that are some degrees short of perfect voluntariness may still be voluntary enough to be accepted as autonomous commitments.
In the real social world, hardly any of the agreements and bargains we accept as voluntary are made between parties in perfectly equal socio-economic positions. This is especially true, despite the efforts of unions, of agreements between wage-workers and large corporate employers. A decision to enter slavery need be no different in kind, at least on the score of unequal powers, from a decision to accept low-paid low-grade employment (or for that matter, to join the army). These latter choices may well be to a degree forced on our indigent agent by his social and economic circumstances, yet according to the prevailing liberal ethos they would still be regarded as free choices that carry all the moral implications of voluntariness. So why shouldn’t the choice of slavery equally be regarded as voluntary?
Again in the real world quite a few women in marginal circumstances resort to prostitution as a way of obtaining some material security. Most of us wouldn’t pretend that the initial situation of these women is a good or reasonable one, or that the prostitution option is so intrinsically attractive that they would have chosen it in better circumstances. Even so, those liberals who favour the legalisation of prostitution under present conditions must also believe that most of the choices women make to pursue this career option are sufficiently voluntary to be socially legitimated and respected. They must regard prostitution as an option that should be freely available to those women (and men too) who are trying, according to their own lights, to do the best they can in a bad situation. Why shouldn’t the slavery option be similarly regarded?
Of course social marginalisation and exclusion are social evils. Ideally nobody should suffer them. We must remember, though, that it is we ourselves, the democratic majority in the liberal capitalist nations, who have determined that our societies should primarily pursue the values of economic liberalism and the free market. We have decided to trade away egalitarian justice for the opportunity, however tenuous, of becoming rich. The emphasis we have given to economic liberties and market competition means that quite large numbers of the poor and marginalised will keep haunting us for the foreseeable future. Shouldn’t we, then, offer them the greatest possible range of opportunities to make, according to their own choices, informed by their own characters and viewpoints, the best they can of their difficult circumstances? Slavery may not be an ideal option for anyone, but it may still be a reasonable option for those locked into miserable and insecure situations. So voluntary slavery could be one element in a range of free opportunities that suit the structure and functioning of our market societies.
3. Voluntary slavery wouldn’t work, no-one would opt for it, because no-one in their right mind would surrender entirely something as basic and important as individual freedom. It couldn’t possibly be a rational choice for anyone. And of course anyone not in full possession of their faculties cannot be held to have autonomously chosen slavery.
Humanity, we know, encompasses a huge variety of actual human beings, each with her or his own unique set of characteristics, capacities and inclinations. Each person is also both influenced and constrained by a particular life history and a specific set of social circumstances. Within this enormous variety we can find not only people who thrive on the continual free exercise of their powers but also people who are uncomfortable with, even terrified by, the demands and exigencies of a fully self-determining life.
Aristotle once said that some people are natural slaves. He was, evidence suggests, quite right. The existence today of submissive housewives, uxorious husbands, volunteer military personnel, religious cult members, and people all too willing to be pushed around by those with wealth and power, testifies to his wisdom. So the right sort of people to be slaves do exist amongst us. And the right sorts of circumstances for slavery — impoverishment and marginalisation — are enveloping more and more people. So, yes, it can reasonably be predicted that if slavery were to be made available as an option in our advanced but polarised capitalist societies, it would be eagerly taken up by quite large numbers of people, none of whom need be acting irrationally.
In fact, conditions are becoming more and more favourable for voluntary slavery. Management and free-market gurus lecture workers on the need to adapt to constant change, to be ready to change their job many times during the course of their working lives, to seek out creative business opportunities for themselves, and to re-train and re-educate themselves continuously. However quite large numbers of people are quite unsuited to this sort of quasi-entrepreneurial lifestyle. They cannot cope with constant unsettling change, and are frightened by the expanded freedom to take responsibility for themselves. In the past many of these gentler souls were sheltered in relatively unproductive but secure employment with governments and in protected industries. However, now that these niches are rapidly disappearing, the people who once occupied them would mostly be destined for failure and destitution unless, of course, the option of slavery is made available. For them the choice of slavery would make a great deal of sense.
Karl Marx once said that the future contains only two possibilities – socialism or barbarism. If he was right, then we have chosen free-market barbarism as the fundamental structure of our societies. Within this structure we can only realistically hope as a society to do the best for people that suffer dehumanised conditions. A policy of re-instituting slavery would be one way of making the best we can out of bad (for some) circumstances.
4. Slave-owners would have unlimited power over their slaves. Such enormous power would inevitably lead to abuse. Slaves would suffer cruelty and maltreatment, and have no recourse or protection against abuse.
Slavery has sometimes been defined, in moral terms, as a relation in which slaves have no rights at all while their owners enjoy the right to do whatever they like to their slaves. Within that structure slaves would be mere instruments, having no more moral or legal status than your television set or electric frying pan. Under the present proposal, however, this would not be the case. Slaves would have rights against their owners, rights to adequate and secure maintenance, which would be legally enforceable. Within this structure, slaves should be just as well protected from abuse by their owners as, say, very young children are currently protected by the state from abuse by their parents. The new slaves, it is envisaged, would have a legal status somewhere between that of domestic animals and very young children, and very akin to that of prisoners of the state.
However, if we in the general community came to regard sole reliance on the state for the protection of slaves’ rights as somewhat inadequate, we could set up non-government humanitarian organisations to monitor and reinforce the performance of this task. In Australia, for instance, in addition to such worthy organisations as the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, we could found the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Slaves. What more could slaves ask for (if they are allowed to ask for anything)?
5. Slavery would morally corrupt the slave-owners. They would not be able to confine the attitudes appropriate to owned objects just to their slaves. They would develop a tendency to treat other free citizens as objects too, rather than as autonomous subjects worthy of equal respect.
Under the present proposal, slavery would involve only a fairly small sector in the mainly capitalist economies of generally liberal democratic societies. Most people would not be either slaves or slave-owners. The numbers of slaves, though substantial, would probably not exceed those of present-day welfare recipients. So the social relationships of the slave-owners would be mostly with other free citizens. Their basic social experience would be of a market economy, democratic political institutions and a liberal legal framework. So there is no reason to expect them to be morally any worse than members of the middle and upper classes are today. Indeed we could reasonably expect the new Master/Slave relationships to be more humanised than brutalised, because of the overwhelmingly liberal humanist socialisation of the new slave-owners. Far from slavery corrupting the slave-owners, the overarching liberal setting for the new form of slavery would influence the owners to be, if anything, excessively considerate to their slaves.
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So there it is, then, the proposal of voluntary enslavement as a way of uplifting the underclass and providing opportunities for those on the border of social exclusion. History, we know, never repeats itself. We can’t re-create the past, nor should we try to, but we would be unwise not to try to adapt the good features of old institutions to new situations and problems while at the same time transforming their bad features. This is precisely what the proposal of voluntary slavery does.
Those who labour in policy think-tanks have often been told to ‘think the unthinkable’ in attempting to devise solutions to current social problems. Slavery certainly counts as unthinkable at the moment, but it has been ruled out of contention by moral theorists and philosophers on the rather simplistic ground that it is, in principle, a bad thing. So is killing. However, just as most of us believe that we can have just wars, so too we could have justified enslavement, if there is no better alternative on offer.
The scale of welfare dependency and the unaffordability of state welfare are major difficulties currently facing our liberal capitalist societies. The welfare state is not working; it cannot provide sufficient welfare and, furthermore, as most mainstream analysts now believe, it has morally pernicious effects on the poor. Leaving people hanging around in idleness at taxpayers’ expense is now seen as a sort of cruelty masquerading as beneficence. The institution of voluntary slavery would be a huge help in stemming the tide of taxpayer-funded welfare payments, and would provide work for those now mired in self-destructive idleness.