Comment by eigenspace
5 hours ago
Oh sorry, I forgot to look at my D&D alignment charts before making my comment, I didnt realize that slavery was evil and thus impermissible. I guess there's no possible comparison to be made with other economic practices that cause massive harm to some people, but benefit others in the short term.
For the sake of argument though, what if we lived in a situation where a very large portion of our agriculture, and other vital forms of economic activity were reliant on slavery? What if there were alternatives, but they weren't quite as economically entrenched, and an overnight banning of slavery would cause an economic collapse that'd cause large scale suffering.
In this hypothetical scenario, would we say that slavery is a net good for humanity? Wouldn't it be okay for our pension funds to invest in more slave production?
I just find it so funny how this person is willing to use completely different ethical frameworks in the same sentence when talking about slavery, versus when talking about fossil fuels.
With fossil fuels, we go and start talking about 'net benefits', and we're willing to accept some catastrophically bad effects in order to reap some benefits, but then when the conversation is about slavery suddenly we switch to toddler ethics of "that's evil." without any consideration for weighing the positives and negatives.