Incentives matter. If it was illegal for someone to make a starving person pay for food with an indentured servant contract, he could just refuse to sell you the food, but his incentive is to sell it to you at the maximum legal price. The result in the real abolitionist world would be that the starving person is better off, and the person selling the food only gets a high fee but misses out on an indentured servant contract.
Libertarians usually can’t handle fixing situations with bad incentives or improving incentives because people respond to the bad incentives voluntarily, so there is no way for a libertarian to decide that prohibiting the bad incentive can improve things
I do not intend to fully generalize this argument, even if I understand it can be interpreted that way.
If you don’t intend to generalize it, on what grounds do you decide that it doesn’t need to be generalized? After all it looks as though the reasoning still applies. That seems like it would foreclose refusing to generalize it.
Refer to Dumbledore’s Army’s definition of the factors that are commonly understood to constitute exploitation/coercion. As far as I can tell, none of them were present in the situation I’ve depicted, at least with the people I spoke to. In their absence, the argument doesn’t generalize.
I am also not maximally libertarian, my libertarian sympathies are strongly based on empirical arguments. If a system was leading to bad outcomes, I have no objection to patching the system.
I would be mad if someone else stepped in and prevented the transaction on abolitionist grounds. It beats starving to death.
This argument is flat out wrong. If slavery is forbidden, the would be slaveowner is incentivized to sell you the food for a price that is large but less than a slave contract. Thus, you would not starve to death, and in fact you would be strictly better off than if the slave contract was allowed.
How is it “wrong”? It’s my hypothetical, we are taking for granted that slavery is an option, legal or not, and that this person would not hire me if they could not get away with enslaving me, and the only immediately available alternative for this hypothetical me was dying of starvation. You are welcome to argue with the premise, but it is intended to be fictional. I am not in straits so dire I would welcome slavery, I am saying what I would do if I were.
It’s “wrong” because you describe a scenario where if slavery is prohibited, you will starve, but in that scenario if slavery is prohibited you won’t starve—because if slavery is banned, the slaver is still incentivized to sell you the food at a price less than a slave contract.
You can’t just say “it’s my scenario so that doesn’t happen”, because to do that you have to have a scenario where incentives don’t work, and if you do the scenario has no relevance to the real world.
The trolley problem doesn’t become invalid because you can point out that real trolleys have emergency brakes.
You are missing the fact that my scenario stipulates that the person is starving, and that is presumably because they are unable to afford food at market rate. If they had disposable income to purchase food at any price, however high, the scenario would never reach the point of the slave contract being on the table in the first place.
The thought experiment is designed to pump a specific moral intuition: that having an additional option available—even an unpleasant one—cannot make you worse off relative to not having that option at all. That point stands even if the real world frequently provides better alternatives. The existence of cases where banning slavery leads to better outcomes (because the would-be slaveowner then offers cash terms) is entirely compatible with my claim. My claim isn’t “slavery bans always lead to worse outcomes.” It’s “if the only alternative is death, then having access to this transaction is better than being prohibited from it by a third party.”
There’s a good reason that I specified that the real world is, thankfully, at a level of economic and moral development (if the latter is a meaningful thing) where vanishingly few people are confronted with a dilemma as stark. I acknowledged that upfront. The thought experiment is a ladder/intuition pump for reaching the underlying moral principle; the Qatari case stands on its own empirical merits. If I thought otherwise, I would put my thought experiment in the body of the text. It is not load bearing, at the very least.
You get to specify that the trolley doesn’t have brakes because you can say “I will only apply the conclusion I am getting from the trolley problem in real life situations that are similar to the trolley problem in that there are no (metaphorical) brakes.”
The equivalent for your slavery contract is “I will permit slavery only in situations where I will starve if a slavery contract is not allowed”. You can’t do this, because you can’t have a slavery law that applies only in a specific, unlikely, scenario. A law permitting slavery will apply in the vastly more common scenario where the slaver is still incentivised to get some money from you and sell you the food.
Incentives matter. If it was illegal for someone to make a starving person pay for food with an indentured servant contract, he could just refuse to sell you the food, but his incentive is to sell it to you at the maximum legal price. The result in the real abolitionist world would be that the starving person is better off, and the person selling the food only gets a high fee but misses out on an indentured servant contract.
Libertarians usually can’t handle fixing situations with bad incentives or improving incentives because people respond to the bad incentives voluntarily, so there is no way for a libertarian to decide that prohibiting the bad incentive can improve things
If you don’t intend to generalize it, on what grounds do you decide that it doesn’t need to be generalized? After all it looks as though the reasoning still applies. That seems like it would foreclose refusing to generalize it.
Refer to Dumbledore’s Army’s definition of the factors that are commonly understood to constitute exploitation/coercion. As far as I can tell, none of them were present in the situation I’ve depicted, at least with the people I spoke to. In their absence, the argument doesn’t generalize.
I am also not maximally libertarian, my libertarian sympathies are strongly based on empirical arguments. If a system was leading to bad outcomes, I have no objection to patching the system.
But one argument you gave is:
This argument is flat out wrong. If slavery is forbidden, the would be slaveowner is incentivized to sell you the food for a price that is large but less than a slave contract. Thus, you would not starve to death, and in fact you would be strictly better off than if the slave contract was allowed.
How is it “wrong”? It’s my hypothetical, we are taking for granted that slavery is an option, legal or not, and that this person would not hire me if they could not get away with enslaving me, and the only immediately available alternative for this hypothetical me was dying of starvation. You are welcome to argue with the premise, but it is intended to be fictional. I am not in straits so dire I would welcome slavery, I am saying what I would do if I were.
It’s “wrong” because you describe a scenario where if slavery is prohibited, you will starve, but in that scenario if slavery is prohibited you won’t starve—because if slavery is banned, the slaver is still incentivized to sell you the food at a price less than a slave contract.
You can’t just say “it’s my scenario so that doesn’t happen”, because to do that you have to have a scenario where incentives don’t work, and if you do the scenario has no relevance to the real world.
The trolley problem doesn’t become invalid because you can point out that real trolleys have emergency brakes.
You are missing the fact that my scenario stipulates that the person is starving, and that is presumably because they are unable to afford food at market rate. If they had disposable income to purchase food at any price, however high, the scenario would never reach the point of the slave contract being on the table in the first place.
The thought experiment is designed to pump a specific moral intuition: that having an additional option available—even an unpleasant one—cannot make you worse off relative to not having that option at all. That point stands even if the real world frequently provides better alternatives. The existence of cases where banning slavery leads to better outcomes (because the would-be slaveowner then offers cash terms) is entirely compatible with my claim. My claim isn’t “slavery bans always lead to worse outcomes.” It’s “if the only alternative is death, then having access to this transaction is better than being prohibited from it by a third party.”
There’s a good reason that I specified that the real world is, thankfully, at a level of economic and moral development (if the latter is a meaningful thing) where vanishingly few people are confronted with a dilemma as stark. I acknowledged that upfront. The thought experiment is a ladder/intuition pump for reaching the underlying moral principle; the Qatari case stands on its own empirical merits. If I thought otherwise, I would put my thought experiment in the body of the text. It is not load bearing, at the very least.
You get to specify that the trolley doesn’t have brakes because you can say “I will only apply the conclusion I am getting from the trolley problem in real life situations that are similar to the trolley problem in that there are no (metaphorical) brakes.”
The equivalent for your slavery contract is “I will permit slavery only in situations where I will starve if a slavery contract is not allowed”. You can’t do this, because you can’t have a slavery law that applies only in a specific, unlikely, scenario. A law permitting slavery will apply in the vastly more common scenario where the slaver is still incentivised to get some money from you and sell you the food.