Should I be free to agree to become a slave?

Great Debates
1

Just as the title asks:

Should I be free to enter into an agreement one term of which is that I become a slave?

In other words, should I be free to enter into an agreement with you which requires me to do work as you demand, and which does not require you to repay me in any way?

One possible answer sort of skirts the issue: No sane person would enter into such an agreement, and no agreement with someone who is not sane is a real agreement, so it’s impossible to make an agreement like the one I described.

But is it really true no sane person would enter into such an agreement?

Perhaps a sane person would enter into such an agreement given certain pressures.

But then it’s tempting to argue that any pressures which would lead a sane person to agree to become a slave are ipso facto such as to make the agreement itself illegitimate–for example, gun-to-the-head type scenarios–and so again it’s impossible for there to be a legitimate agreement to become a slave.

This invites the sticky question of where the line should be drawn between pressure that renders an agreement illegitimate and pressure that fails to do so. Is it just a question of quantity, or is it a question of kind of pressure as well? Does it matter whether that which exerts the pressure is distinct from the entity one is entering into the agreement with? Etc.

Moreover, is it really impossible that someone perfectly sane might enter wholly voluntarily into an agreement to be a slave? Perhaps there are sane people who legitimately (which is not to say correctly) believe the position of a slave is a good one for them. If there are such people, should the be free to become slaves?

2

Sure, you should be free to do that. But you should also be free to rescind that agreement at any time.

3

What is your definition of slavery? Is it “not being paid” that makes a slave a slave? Does the payment have to be monetary? Where do indentured servitude, unpaid internships, enlistment in the armed forces, and joining a religious order (becoming a nun or monk) fit vis-a-vis slavery?

4

Sure, but the agreement is and should be unenforceable. If you want to work for someone else for free, nobody’s stopping you. It’s only if you change your mind but your “owner” expects you to remain a slave that the question of whether it is legally binding even comes up.

5

We can also construct hypotheticals in which the would-be master actually has something to offer which the would-be slave freely considers to be worth their life’s work (though it would probably have to be an altruistic purchase).

What if the other side of the exchange can’t be as easily rescinded? Or are we only considering scenarios in which the slave has donated himself for nothing at all?

6

I’m not a lawyer, but my understanding is that you can agree to be someone’s slave: the law does not stop you doing that. However, the courts will not enforce that contract: you can walk out of the agreement at any time, and the “slave master” can’t do anything about it: if he tried to stop you, it would be unlawful imprisonment.

In addition, slavery as practiced in the U.S. before the Civil War involved the children of slaves becoming the property of the slave master. There is no way that the courts would uphold a parent selling children into slavery as part of agreeing to be a slave, and I suspect that such an agreement would be unlawful because it would be in breach of child welfare laws.

7

Why do you think we call them “interns”?

8

:smiley:

9

I suppose not, since the OP says,

Presumably another term would be the reason for the would-be slave being interested in the first place.

10

You mean what if the slaveholder has given the slave something of value for the slavery? The agreement to be a slave should still be voidable by the slave at any time, although he should be liable for the value given. That’s basically the situation with professional athletes; you can’t get specific performance on a contract for personal services and force the player to play for your team after he signs the contract, but you can sue him for the money he was paid to play and enjoin him from playing for any other team.

11

People enter into slave contracts all the time in the BDSM scene.

However, these contracts are legally unenforceable.

The interesting thing about legalized slavery is that it requires the state to enforce it. It requires the state to treat a slave differently than a free person.

What happens when the master tells the slave to go out and pick the cotton, and the slave refuses and the master beats the slave? Has the master committed assault and battery? Or does the law recognize that a master may beat his property in a way that would be assault if he did it to some guy who just happened to be staying at his house? Can a slave bring a lawsuit, or enter into contracts, or vote, or serve on a jury, or own property, or testify in court? Roman law used to allow the testimony of slaves, but only if the testimony was extracted via torture.

If we’re talking about some future Libertopia, where people are free to enter into any contracts they wish, the government has no reason to treat a person who sold themselves into slavery differently than any other person. And therefore, many of the classic features of slavery are impossible.

Under current law, it is very very difficult to get courts to enforce agreements for specific performance. Suppose I contract to whitewash your fence in return for $10. You give me the money, but I don’t whitewash your fence. So you sue me. The court won’t order me to whitewash your fence, rather they’ll order me to return the $10. And the reason why is obvious–if I refuse to obey the court order to get out there and whitewash the fence, what are they going to do? Hold me in contempt of court, I guess. Whereas if the court orders me to pay the $10, and I refuse, they can go to my bank and order the bank to take $10 out of my account and hand it over to you, or go to my employer, or put a lien on my house. There are all kinds of ways to extract money out of an unwilling person, but very few ways to get them to provide specific performance.

So, if you “sold yourself into slavery”, which would mean you agree to sell your entire future labor to someone in return for some lump sum, what happens when you don’t work? Your “master” can go to court and sue you and ask them to enforce the contract. But that means the court will order you to repay the purchase price, they won’t order you to get to work. And if the “slave” doesn’t have the money anymore? The “master” is free to try to collect, but how do you collect against a broke person? If bankruptcy is possible, the slave can pretty easily discharge the debt, so I guess we’d have to eliminate bankruptcy and bring back debtor’s prisons for this to work, then the slave would have a choice between working for the master or a government workhouse.

It’s pretty easy to see that if slavery is merely a private contractual agreement between two parties that the arrangement isn’t going to resemble classical slavery very much. For that you need either state enforcement of slavery, or a state so weak that a powerful person can force you to work at gunpoint for years without fear of being charged with assault.

People have been privately held in slavery in this country in that fashion–some guy kidnaps you, takes you to his secluded house, locks you in chains, and beats you if you don’t do what he says. Except, if the cops find out, that guy is going to prison for a long time. That doesn’t count as legal slavery.

12

Yes, but I was thinking of things that weren’t valuable in monetary terms, like lives and environments. If I accept your servitude in exchange for some difficult action that protects the lives of your whole family, and then later you back out, what is my recourse?

13

That hits right on what Lemur866 is talking about - what should be your recourse if he doesn’t perform? You get a court to order him to perform his slavery duties and he still won’t, so what do you do? Traditionally, the answer was “beat or torture him until he does,” which is one of many reasons society as a whole has moved away from slavery.

14

That is not inherently true. Even today, there are some debts that are not discharged when someone declares bankruptcy - child support, student loans and some taxes, for example. This hypothetical society could easily have a law that damages for breaking a slavery contract will not be discharged - or forbid it on the assumption that the slave planned to break the contract and declare bankruptcy and thus was committing fraud.

15

You have no recourse under a Libertarian context. Or to put it more precisely, no one else is obligated to help you collect, you’d have to do it yourself, and not violate laws against assault and suchlike while you’re doing it.

Even if you have the contractual right to the person’s labor, you still don’t have the right to beat them or threaten them or imprison them or torture them or rape them or kill them. The person agreed to perform such-and-such action for such-and-such good and valuable consideration. So it’s just like when you pay someone money but they don’t hold up their end of the bargain, and when you go to get their money back you find they’re already broke.

One way would be to include onerous penalty clauses in the contract. However, courts often refuse to enforce unreasonable penalty clauses. If I agree to fix your roof, and I don’t do it, and the roof leaks and your house is damaged, I can be ordered to pay damages. Or if you agree to play for my sports team for a million dollars, and then refuse to play, and I lose advertising revenue because my team loses all the time, then a large penalty clause is reasonable. But if I agree to pay a million dollars if I don’t fix your roof, and I don’t fix the roof but you suffer no other ill effects other than needing to pay someone else to fix the roof, then generally the courts will hold that the penalty clause was unreasonable.

So if I’m dangling from a ledge, and you’ve got a ladder, and I agree to sell myself into slavery in return for you saving me, and then when I climb down I try to renege on the contract, well, you’re out of luck. And even if there was a substantial penalty clause, good luck finding a court to enforce it. Maybe under a Libertopian government the courts would uphold unreasonable penalty clauses, but I don’t see why they should. And even if they did, the worst that happens is that I’m now bankrupt, with whatever consequences that carries in Libertopia.

16

Of course, we’d only do this if we’re intentionally creating a society this way because we like the idea of voluntary slavery in a libertarian context and want to make it legally possible.

Even if we declare it to be fraud, well, then the slave goes to jail for fraud, and still the master is out of luck. Except in most Libertopias the remedy for fraud isn’t jail but restitution. And so the former slave finds that his paychecks and tax returns get attached until he’s paid off his debt to his former master.

17

It has happened, some missionaries have become slaves to reach other slaves in what I recall is some African country.

18

I think that someone has every right to be someone else’s slave if they so desire.
The issue with the matter is that nobody has the right to own said slave. There’s two sides to it, and the other side is the immoral one. You can’t make a man free, but you can stop him from being owned.

19

I think that’s pretty much it – you’re free to go into slavery, it’s just that it’s impossible for you to do so. First, slavery entered into freely isn’t slavery in the ordinary sense; second, a society that allows you personal freedom can’t allow slavery simultaneously. Freedom and slavery are not two concepts that can coexist in the same social context: either there’s slavery, and you have no freedom to enter into it, but rather, are forced to; or, there’s freedom, in which case you could enter slavery of sorts, but there would be no grounds on which to prohibit your leaving it again – and slavery you can leave any time you want really isn’t slavery.

I think the thing is that it’s not really up to you, or at least, not up to you alone, what rights you have, but to society as a whole – and if society decides that you have a right to be free, while you can freely decide not to exercise that right, you can’t give it away on your own accord, as that would require a change not on the individual, but rather on the societal level, which you can’t unilaterally invoke. So you can proclaim ‘I am not free’ and act accordingly, but in a free society, nobody else is bound to adhere to that dictum.

20

Yes, and contrary to the OP, many of them are perfectly sane, as are their Masters. It’s not unusual for the parties involved to sign a contract or to record a video disclaimer of sorts, but they’re generally not binding legally.