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By Liberals and their successors only. Slavery has been widely considered a just or necessary practice before the Industrial Revolution. Aristotle famously makes a convincing argument that without it, progress is impossible.
I don't support it myself since we have machines now and I generally agree with Liberals directionally when it comes to the individual. But they do overstate their case for political reasons. That much is clear.
I don't believe in Rawlsianism, but let's consider Rome.
Most household and business managers and agents were slaves, and they were even a preferred caste in banking and accounting, and quite common in intellectual pursuits. So I'd probably fall under that category in that society anyways. And my life would be less constrained in some ways and more constrained in others. In
The most brutal accounts revolve around what one would predict: agriculture and mining. But they don't strike me as less exploitative than the treatment of nominally free workers in the 1800s. In fact it is often remarked upon by contemporaries of the Industrial Revolution (such as Marx as I mention previously) that the incentives of capitalism are actually worse for the underlings than those of slavery.
A slave you have to feed and shelter all year and throughout his life lest you eat into your investment. An employee you can and should dismiss if they are not making you money. To be fair, abandonment was also an issue with slavery, but in Rome it was specifically made illegal to reclaim abandoned slaves because they system relied on these incentives. The lumpenproletariat is a uniquely modern issue.
From the point of view of the middle class, slavery is an indignity for obvious reasons: it refuses them bluntly access to higher prestige, certain professions, and general control over their personal life that they could fully enjoy given their means.
But for the lowest of the low, for those people for whom getting a meal is not a given, which is what led us down this path of discussion, rights and dignity are not those prized treats. And selling themselves into service can actually be a good deal.
This is the real charge against modernity that communists and other successors of Liberalism successfully accuse it with. That those nice ideas of individualism and freedom are only good for those that already had the means to enjoy them and that removing the other forms of bonds society used to run on makes all the miserable untied to the now free individual.
Being more free and having more rights is not necessarily in your interest.
Servants were often in a similar position. Back in the day, even quite poor famillies would often have a cook, say, who had a personal role in that household. Now, people still employ cooks, but they work in warehouses preparing meals for Uber Eats.
The bad of personal employment: less personal agency, more potential for victimisation at the hands of bad employers. The good: your employers are pretty explicitly responsible for your general wellbeing in the eyes of society, and they aren't so beholden to profit margins.
Or to put it another way, in a fluid modern economy, nobody is responsible for you except for you. That can be very empowering, but it can also put you in a position where all of your options are bad and you end up essentially responsible for exploiting yourself.
Which is, sadly, the desired end goal of Liberalism and the quest to return to the state of nature. Now the problem is that this isn't actually conducive to the promises made alongside it, such as equality, but even if it were, the prospect of destroying all that is human about the relationships we have in exchange for some individualistic principles is something that normal people have never desired.
There's a lot of literature on how schooling was made mandatory specifically to break the spirit of the peasant hordes so they would behave like good cogs for the industrial machine. Much of Luddism is about resiting just this tendency, and I don't think the Luddites were ever heard for the substance of their criticism.
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earlier you claimed that this was far more widely applicable and favourable also in comparison to modern people in general:
are you withdrawing this claim and admit that no such society existed?
And for such people in past slavery could be preferable, before industrial society made everyone much richer. But is not applying anymore. So I am also confused why you think that slavery would be better for such people than their current life.
I admit that live of exploited slave could be better than life of a heroin addict. But it is pretty hard to find modern people for which being enslaved would increase their access to a food.
So for which areas "societies treated slaves with more decency than modern man commends"? You admit now that these are out. You yourself excluded "commodified material comfort" earlier. So, in which exactly areas slaves had supposedly a better life?
I'll grant you that I kinda lost the plot of our conversation by delving into material conditions, which are after all off topic given my caveat. This entire question of food access is a red herring. But I felt it necessary to at least give some context.
Now, consider the average lumpenprole of today. I'm quite familiar with that life since I've lived among them for a quite some time and arguably been one at some point.
He doesn't work, properly speaking. His sustenance is guaranteed by the state through "benefits" and "social insurance", and actually working is in fact discouraged since he would lose these safety nets. Drugs and crime are among his main activities, and he is so plainly excluded from social institutions that he can only muster contempt for them, and the occasional violent riot, despite being ostensibly dependent on the dole to exist and generally benefiting from heroic budgetary efforts to make his misery comfortable.
Now such a person, in my view, is maintained by this free material comfort in a state of profound spiritual disease. His life is even more pointless and abject that the average modern life. All he exists to do is pad some statistics.
The sentiment this situation evokes and the behaviors it engenders are best explained by Kassovitz's film La Haine. It exposes very clearly the profound incomfort and unnatural sense of atomization and exclusion you get out of being stuck in this nonsense position of subsidized mediocrity. And predictably ends in autodestruction.
In comparison, the Roman slave is the victim of a much more tangible form of authoritarianism, but he is not outside society. He is an integrated part that the whole thing relies on and has both a spiritual and a functional place in some metaphysical order. Again it's not particularly a kind of order I like, but it is still some order. He belongs. His suffering has a point, even a tangible value.
He is not pure wastes. And while you could successfully argue that escape from his condition is a lot harder (though not impossible) than escape from the lumpenprole's, it is a lot better to be a slave than to be an unsocialized nothing. In all ways but material.
This is why I predicted (accurately I might add) that UBI experiments would fail and result is more miserable people. Unemployment is legitimately harder on people than forced labor in these ways. People need to do things and to participate in their society, and this is not subsidiary but coequal to the need to eat, sleep and drink.
The sense of belonging is material. What isn't material is imagining that Roman slaves on average had it better based on your own yearning for "a point" you had or do feel. I can just as well imagine a modern lumpenprole taking satisfaction from leeching off the society that failed to give him a dignified life, and finding that as low as his life is, it is at least better than coping with forced servitude.
My general impression is that people retreat to "spiritual value" when they don't feel any actual value and desperately need to.
My general impression is that materialists refuse to acknowledge anything that isn't quantifiable and therefore reneg on all the sentimental bonds that actually hold a society together because they have a misplaced faith in the sole power of material comfort.
We are having a metaphysical disagreement. Which is annoying because we can both just dismiss each other's position as nonsense. But that's not really useful.
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So in
by "modern man" you meant only not working lumpenproles on a dole?
I certainly do not mean "all modern men are treated worse than the worse of slaves in every way" if that's what you're reading.
But no, it's not just lumpenproles that are victimized by the tendency they exemplify.
Alienation permeates all strata of modern society, unfortunately.
I read it as a claim that includes at least typical modern men.
I'll stand by that, servitude was a lot more human and thick a relationship than the way capital uses common people today.
And yes, I do consider the fact that being literally owned by another person is dehumanizing to a pretty extreme degree. But still less so than being a number on a spreadsheet discarded at will.
There's also an argument to be made about the higher levels of control modernity allows, and that common man is essentially as controlled as a slave without the need for explicit shackles. But that's off topic.
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