Slavery and evil

[Raven Crowking]

Removed

 

[Toben the Many]

"Sounds like a great life, huh? I think just about anyone in modern society would count this as abuse, and consider her husband a generally evil guy. "

Modern people, yes. Me, yes. My feudal pseudo-medieval paladin? Maybe not.

Oh, I strongly disagree. There is alot of evidence that the people of the medieval ages knew exactly how oppressed they were. Alot of writings from people of the time both male and female point to the idea that they knew that the existing system was incredibly unfair and oppressive.

 

[fusangite]

Oh, I strongly disagree. There is alot of evidence that the people of the medieval ages knew exactly how oppressed they were. Alot of writings from people of the time both male and female point to the idea that they knew that the existing system was incredibly unfair and oppressive.

I'm sorry but being unhappy with your particular condition and believing it to be unfair does not translate into believing the system is wrong. In the past, more slaves dreamed of owning slaves than freeing them. Most people still bought into the value system of the system that oppressed them. Not that that is any different today.

 

[Iron Sheep]

Magic Missile does not have to be used to murder someone (and neither does the weapon). Charm Person has no other use but to suppress a humanoid's free will. If Charm Person is not oppression, then frankly nothing is.

Shackles have no other use but to suppress a humanoid's freedom of movement. Your argument would say that the only use of shackles is to oppress someone.

It does not account for the just use of them to prevent a dangerous individual from causing harm to others. The same argument can be used to justify the use of charm person under some circumstances.

But yes, charm person and its relatives are spells which have an inherent slippery slope aspect, since it gives such power over a person's actions.

Which is just another way of saying that an individual DM gets to decide which acts of oppression are evil, and which aren't.

No, a DM gets to decide if a given use of force or authority was done fairly and justly.

Which brings us right back to the fact that DMs interested in an absolute alignment system have to define Good and Evil (and Law and Chaos) for his or her campaign before any discussion of where slavery (or just about anything else) fits is reasonable. Thanks for demonstrating my point so nicely.

I personally find it very difficult to see how it can be claimed that in any historical system slave owners (or at least the vast majority of them) did not oppress the enslaved. Maybe one can argue degree, but it is oppression.

Let me re-iterate: slavery at best is a combination of kidnapping, imprisonment and forced labour. If it is done to the innocent it is (by-the-book D&D) Evil.

Corran

 

[John Morrow]

First, thanks for the reasoned responses. I also appologize if I'm sounding a bit snippy and hostile in some of my replies. I'm honestly interested in testing my ideas out here and appreciate the criticism.

Before I first get to your questions/responses can we first agree that the notions of Good, Evil, and Neutrality can be applied to persons, institutions, actions, and intentions, at least in D&D? For example, healing people may be a good action, but an evil person may heal someone based on an evil intention. Or even with a good intention, if it were someone the evil person cared about personally.

I agree that the D&D notions of alignment may be applied to persons, institutions, actions, and intentions, but I don't necessarily view it as simply the sum total of a person's actions with respect to characters and creatures. Alignment is something that can be detected for, just like Magic can be. That suggests to me that alignment is a matter of internal nature of psyche.

I'll try to explain in a bit more depth how I've been interpreting it.

I think that alignment, on the Good to Evil axis, corresponds roughly with empathy and cuts to the core of the Golden Rule (Do unto others as you would have them do unto you). In the real world, sociopaths lack empathy and view other people as little more than playthings. At the other end of the spectrum are people who have such a strong sense of empathy and need to help others that they dedicate their lives to helping others. In between are peoople who just want to get by and worry about themselves more than others. They have enough empathy to not casually abuse others but no so much that they are going to make great sacrifices to help others. Similarly, they don't go out of their way to hurt other people and get no joy out of it. Those three "natures" correspond to Evil, Good, and Neutral, as I see it.

On the other axis, you have the Franklin quote (I'll use the misquote because it better fits this discussion of alignment) that "He who sacrifices their liberty for security deserves neither." The Chaotic character values liberty in the same way that the Good character values the lives of others, while the Lawful value security through order with the same zealousness, with the Neutral looking for a pragmatic balance between the two. In many ways, the Chaotic character equates liberty with Good while the Lawful character equates order with Good.

At the four corners (LG, LE, CG, and CE), you have characters who have their loyalties divided between two ideals and they are forever on a slippery slope, dealing with the inevitable conflicts of interest between the two "Goods" that they serve at the same time. At the four centers (NG, LN, NE, and CN) you have people who do whatever it takes to further their single ideal or "Good". In the middle is simply pragmatic survival, which is why animals also register as Neutral. It's basically people worrying about themselves, their family,and their friends.

So, ultimately, I view Neutral as the default alignment and, perhaps, most common alignment. They are "good" in the sense that they are often nice people who are good to their family and friends, pay their taxes, etc., but they are not Good in the D&D detectable sense in that they are not actively altruistic or seeking to help others.

People who register as Good or Evil using a detect spell, in my opinion, aren't casually altruistic or cruel but altruistic or cruel because their nature all but demands it. So the question of whether slavery is Good or Evil, in a meaningful sense to me, is a matter of whether owning a slave is compatible with altruism, pragmatism, or cruelty. I see it as being compatible with pragmatism and cruelty. Of course that means that I'm also not looking at the act in isolation.

But in this way, a Thomas Jefferson or George Washinton would detect as Neutral (or possibly even Good, particularly in the case of Washington) despite the fact that they owned slaves because their hearts were not cruel (for the sake of argument -- I don't want to get into a debate of historical personas). A Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Jeffrey Dahlmer, on the other hand, were cruel and enjoyed dominating, hurting, and or killing others so they would detect at Evil. It's that sort of distinction that I'm looking for.

The alignment of an individual or a society does not change on the basis of single instances. It is rather based upon cumulative instances of action, or cumulative instances of institution.

I agree in principle but interpret it a bit differnently than you do.

Example: Healing others is a good action, and a hospital is in theory a good institution. However, a hospital may be run by evil beings, it may be run for evil reasons (secretly harvesting organs for the rich and powerful) and/or it may be run within an evil nation.

And I think that's the problem with trying to evaluate the alignment of an act independent of the motive and results of that action. I don't think you can always say that "Slavery is Evil" or "Healing is Good" because there are contexts where slavery might simply Neutral and Healing can be Evil. I think it all goes back to altruism and cruelty. If you can argue that Healing is always altruistic or Slavery is always cruel (and you are making a very good case that it's at least always opressive and may always be Evil on those grounds), then I think you can say that Healing, as an abstract act, is Good or Slavery, as an abstract act, is Evil.

Killing or torturing sentient beings is an evil act in D&D (as many have pointed out), but it is often a necessary act in most D&D worlds. A good character might kill another good character with the intention to do good overall, but the act itself is still evil.

I would also point out that 3.x D&D alignment system puts the qualifier "innocent" in the definition of Good for a reason but I would argue that torture is never really necessary and modern standards of warfare and law enforcement would agree (in fact, an American soldier has been charged for simply tormenting an Iraqi insurgent by discharging a gun next to his head and threatening to kill him). In my opinion, the character who would detect as Good would not think to torture an opponent. "The ends justify the means" is a pragmatic assessment and pragmatism, in my opinion, is Neutral, not Good. Good means having standards and ideals just as Evil means having cruelties and perversions.

Likewise, slavery is evil, but good people might be blind to the evil of slavery, or they might choose to ignore that evil because fighting it is just too difficult and/or costly. If a society's institutions are predominantly good, but it also has slavery, it is possible that the society is still a good society. It is simply not "as good" as it could possibly be.

I don't think that a Good person, in the sense that a person detects as Good, could ever be blind to the evils of slavery because their altruism and empathy would not permit them to turn a blind eye. Yes, they might choose to ignore the evil because the fight is too difficult or costly but they would take every opportunity to undermine that Evil. See, for example, the Abolitionists in the United States. They were willing to nearly destroy the country in order to end slavery. They didn't simmply wash their hands of it. Similarly, a society that is predominantly Good (or wants to think of itself as Good) would not continue to condone slavery and, again, I point to the American experience with slavery as an example, with the critiques of slavery predating the founding of the country.

I do agree that once we are talking about societies, we can discuss averages and there can be ideosyncracies and holdovers from an earlier day, but just as slavery was an open wound that tore the United States apart, so too would slavery be a contenious issue ultimately destined for extinction in a society peopled predominantly with Good people and with a predominantly Good leadership.

In the case of paladins, being unable to perform "an evil act" obviously requires some leeway, because otherwise no paladin could possibly retain the class through even a single standard D&D adventure.

I don't entirely agree. There is "leeway" and there is "leeway". American soldiers fighting in Iraq and American police officers have far less "leeway" in how they deal with the bad guys than a lot of Paladins seem to be given in a D&D game. If soldiers and police officers can be expected to respect civilized rules of warfare and the civil rights of the accused, so too can a Paladin.

The problem is that a lot of players, like the police officers who beat Rodney King or the officer in Iraq who threatened to shoot in Iraq in the head if he didn't tell the officer where other insurgents where hiding, lose their temper or take the quick and dirty way out. I don't think that's Good and I especially don't think that's acceptable for a Paladin at all. For a Paladin, the ends should not justify the means, any more than it should for a soldier or police officer. Paladins should be special and hard to play. To paraphrase the old Hebrew National hot dog commercial, they answer to a higher authority.

Often, I think the GM is responsible for players with Good characters to cut corners through frustration. If the GM keeps putting Paladins in situations where they have to torture the bad guys or thousands will die, then the players will eventually start torturing to solve the problem. And if it works, they players will just keep doing it.

Obviously, you can alter the rules however you like. In the core rules, though, opression is explicitly evil.

In the core rules, killing others is also Evil in the exact same sentence. Yet under Neutral, it says that, "People who are neutral with respect to good and evil have compunctions against killing the innocent," which implies that a Neutral character might kill an innocent under certain circumstances and may have no compunctions about killing those who are not innocent. Transferring that line over to oppression, a neutral character would compunctions against oppressing the innocent but might accept it in certain contexts (such as in the institution of slavery) and would accept it where those who are oppressed are not innocent (e.g., a generally Evil race).

Perhaps you are correct that slavery, as a practice, is Evil but it can be practiced by a Neutral character or society, just as murder is Evil but might be committed by a Neutral character or society in the right circumstances (e.g., particularly a "The ends justify the means" context). My main concern is whether the character practicing an act is Good, Neutral, or Evil in (A) the sense of a detect spell and (B) where their soul goes when they die.

Crossing the road is a neutral action. Eating breakfast is a neutral action. Stretching out the kinks in my back is a neutral action. An action is obviously neutral if it carries no ethical weight.

Fair enough. But there are also pragmatic acts that do have ethical weight but still wash out as Neutral. They range from killing animals for food to the death penalty for murder. Some people will see them as Good or Evil but on balance, most people will just consider them a pragmatic part of life.

Again, this is not simply "desirable" or "undesirable". Working as a maid is a neutral action, because it carries no ethical weight. Treating your maid well is a good action, because it does carry an ethical weigh. Treating your maid badly is an evil action, because it does carry an ethical weight. Forcing someone to act as your maid whether that person wants to or not clearly has an ethical weight, and that ethical weight is clearly neither good nor neutral.

I think that over simplifies slavery. The slave owner also had obligations to their slaves and in many societies, slaves had substantial rights. In fact, the slave owner in the American South had more obligation to look after a slave who became injured and could no longer work than a businessman had to look after a worker who became injured and could no longer work. In fact, I've read that's why the industrial North preferred immigrant labor to slaves--they were cheaper and had fewer strings attached.

In general, giving of yourself for the benefit of another is good. Taking from others for the benefit of yourself is evil. Depending upon the circumstances, working together for mutual benefit may be good, neutral, or evil.

I presume that by "taking", you are implying a lack of willingness in the exhange. Perhaps that, alone, makes slavery Evil. But don't forget that slave owners did generally have obligations toward their slaves, as well, and it is not as if slaves got nothing in return in most cases. Again, I'm not calling it an ideal or even desirable situation. I'm simply pointing out that most slave owners didn't grossly mistreat their slaves, if for no other reason than pragmatisim. Slaves were an investment and if you abuse them, you destroy your investment. Slavery in an entirely Evil context, where orcs or some other Evil group simply gather slaves through conquest, may have no such incentive to treat their slaves well.

Clearly, there are degrees of evil, as there are degrees of good and shades of neutrality. But, again, simply noting that X is more evil than Y does not make Y somehow not evil. Y either is, or is not, evil on its own merits.

My primary concern is whether a Neutral character or Neutral society could engage in slavery. I think you've made a good point that just because a Neutral character or society might engage in slavery for whatever reason that the act, itself, is always Evil. I think you've persuaded me that you are correct.

I hope that the above clarified my position enough that you already know how I will answer this.

Yes, in a round-about way.

You are neutral if the preponderance of your actions do not make you either good or evil. Evil is not the absence of good, nor good the absence of evil. Both require some form of action. The root of evil is greed...putting the needs or desires of the self before the needs or desires of others. The root of good is selflessness...being willing to sacrifice a portion of your needs or desires for the needs or desires of others. Most people are neutral simply because, as the D&D alignment system rightly points out, few of us are so committed to helping ourselves or others that we can keep up the lifestyle.

I would argue that the root of Evil is not greed but cruelty. The SRD alignment definitions allow for Neutral characters to do Evil things in self interest but not recreationally. That's the dividing line. The Neutral character might buy slaves to keep his farm running, might murder to get food to feed their family, might torture to get information to save their friends. A Good character would do none of those things while an Evil character will enslave, murder, and torture with impunity, either because they enjoy it or because they are indifferent to it.

I agree with you abotu goodness and about the fact that most people are Neutral. In fact, that's a big part of my point. I don't think that many historic slave owners were Evil in a D&D sense. I think they were simply Neutral. I don't think it makes sense to catagorize both George Washington (because he owned slaves) and Ted Bundy (because he murdered women for kicks) as Evil.

A neutral person could:

hate slavery, but go along with it,
think slavery is part of the proper ordering of the cosmos,
refuse to participate in slavery,
fight slavery,
sell slaves,
capture slaves,
be a slave,
etc., etc., etc.​

Fair enough.

Of course, the same holds true for a good or evil character. Just because a character is good does not mean that he fights every evil out there, or even recognizes every evil as wrong. Just because a character is evil doesn't mean that she has to participate in every evil action possible.

I do think that a Good character, in the sense that they detect as Good, would recognize nearly every Evil as wrong and this would shade what they are willing to do. I do think that a Good character might not necessarily slip out at night and free every slave they can find but I don't think a Good character would ever indifferently look the other way about slavery or consider it the proper order of the cosmos. Especially, as if you convincingly argue, slavery as an act is always Evil.

Again, it goes down to the simple idea of "If an orc takes in the orphaned son of its comrade-in-arms, does the orc automatically become good?" I would say "obviously not", though it is equally obvious that the orc is performing a good action.

Remember, it's not necessarily Good if it's not altruistic and the alignment definitions rightly suggest that altruism extends beyond personal friendships and familial obligations.

My game makes a distinction between creatures that are Evil by nature (they have no choice) and Evil by nurture (they can choose not to be Evil). While Orcs fall into the latter category in my game, goblinoids fall into the former category. Because of that, a gobling would simply never choose to take in the orphaned son of a comrade-in-arms because it's beyond their nature to even think of such a thing. In fact, goblin mothers are not beyond sacrificing their own children to save themselves. That's what I think it means to be Evil by nature. You won't even think of being Good or doing Good things.

Likewise, there in no contradiction in claiming that Thomas Jefferson was a good person, although he owned slaves, and doing so was an evil action.

Well, one might argue that Jefferson was Neutral, though a good case can certainly be made that George Washington was Good (and, in fact, he freed his own slaves upon his death).

The D&D alignment system, like real life, offers a wide assortment of grey areas. You don't have to become a moral relativist to be aware that good people sometimes do evil things, and evil people sometimes do good things.

Please do not mistake my analysis as moral relativism. I'm not a moral relativist in real life and I'm certainly not trying to be one here. What I'm trying to do is determine the limits of what Good and Evil are in the objective context of the D&D alignment system as presented in the SRD and PH.

Thanks for your comments. They've certainly given me a lot to think about.

 

[Toben the Many]

I'm sorry but being unhappy with your particular condition and believing it to be unfair does not translate into believing the system is wrong. In the past, more slaves dreamed of owning slaves than freeing them. Most people still bought into the value system of the system that oppressed them. Not that that is any different today.

Well said! Ethically speaking, any given action is right or wrong, despite what someone may believe. I'm just putting my hat in the ring and saying that slavery is a (D&D) Evil act, no matter who you are.

And I agree that it would be entirely possible for a (D&D) Good person to be a slave-owner. One single evil act does not make one a (D&D) Evil person.

 

[Raven Crowking]

Removed

 

[DMScott]

Shackles have no other use but to suppress a humanoid's freedom of movement. Your argument would say that the only use of shackles is to oppress someone.

Correct, except that it's your argument that oppression is de facto evil in D&D. All I've done is show how your argument is inadequate to define anything as evil. I hope you're finally getting it.

I personally find it very difficult to see how it can be claimed that in any historical system slave owners (or at least the vast majority of them) did not oppress the enslaved. Maybe one can argue degree, but it is oppression.

Whether they were oppressed or not does not matter, because as you've agreed simple oppression isn't a good enough definition of evil for an absolute alignment system.

Let me re-iterate: slavery at best is a combination of kidnapping, imprisonment and forced labour. If it is done to the innocent it is (by-the-book D&D) Evil.

You seem to be talking purely about the African slave trade to the Americas, which I would agree makes a fine model for evil slavery. That is, however, by no means the only model that might exist in a D&D game (and, of course, also not the only model that existed historically). That is why I said that both the absolute alignment system and the type of slavery under discussion need to be defined before anything useful can be said about whether slavery is evil in a particular campaign.

 

[Iron Sheep]

Can you refuse to pay your taxes? Can you refuse to obey the speed limit? Can you refuse to work and still demand a paycheck from your employer?

Life is full of obligations and things you can't refuse (in any realistic or meaningful way). The question, I think, is not whether slaves have obligations or a right of refusal but what obligations are demanded of them, what rights they have, and what obligations their owners have. Again, I'm not claiming that this arrangement will ever rise to the status of Good but it can certainly fall well within the definition of Neutral, in my opinion.

Based on further discussion earlier in the thread, the difference is whether or not the compulsion is just. Levying reasonable taxes is probably just; oppressive levels of taxation would be unjust and therefore (D&D) Evil. An employer refusing to pay for work which has not been done is fair. An employer refusing to pay for work which has not been done is unfair.

Denying an innocent basic freedoms is unjust and oppressive.

When a Paladin's "Detect Evil" can't differentiate Thomas Jefferson and Pol Pot, something is wrong.

Thomas Jefferson owned 187 slaves. That is 187 people who were held against their will and forced to work for the enrichment of Thomas Jefferson. This was not a short-term situation, but a continuous pattern of behaviour over large portions of his slave's lives. That he was morally conflicted over his actions does not change the nature of his actions.

So no, Thomas Jefferson is no Pol Pot, but his actions with regard to his slaves surely meet the citerion for Evil in the D&D sense.

How does slavery not fit into that definition, especially if the form of slavery practiced prohibits the murder and mistreatment of slaves? Remember, saying that slavery can be Neutral does not mean that slavery is Good.

Because in enslaving someone who has done no wrong, a wrong is being done to the slave. The fact that there may be legal limits on the amount of abuse than can be meted out on them, but that doesn't make it Neutral.

To simplify greatly, but illustrate the distinction you are trying to draw: this is a bit like saying that if someone is kidnapped and not murdered, then it's a Neutral act because they could have been murdered.

There are plenty of reasons why people became slaves (all were not carted off from their homelands) and the alternative facing at least some of those taken from their homelands was death. Consider that when the Mycenaean Greeks destroyed Troy, they carried the women and children back to Greece to work as slaves who, for example, processed flax into linen. They had destroyed the city, killed all the men, carried off all of the wealth, and had probably killed or eaten all of the animals. Would it have really been more humane for the Greeks to leave them on the shores of Asia Minor to fend for themselves?

So compounding the (D&D) Evil of slaughtering all the Trojan men by enslaving the women and children makes the enslavement Neutral?

In the real world, most peple are required to work against their will. I don't have the option to quit my job and survive on the good will of others.

But you do have the right to change your job to one you find more appealing or where you are better treated.

Remeber that D&D does have a third option between Good and Evil. As the SRD says:

"People who are neutral with respect to good and evil have compunctions against killing the innocent but lack the commitment to make sacrifices to protect or help others. Neutral people are committed to others by personal relationships."

Why can't slavery fit into that definition? Put another way, why does an act have to cross the threshold of being Good in order to be Neutral?

I read this as saying basically that the Neutral in D&D can distinguish between Good and Evil, but are not prepared to make personal sacrifices to do Good things. But neither will they perform overt Evil acts. They will act when something happens to themselves or those they care about.

And I would argue that a Good agrarian society in D&D should be structured that way. The question is not whether slavery can be Good but whether it can be Neutral.

The only point of raising this example was to show that serfdom does not fit the mould of D&D Good.

What part of the SRD definition, in particular, makes you think that slavery is Evil? And what part of teh SRD definition of Neutral makes you think that it can't apply to slavery?

For me it boils down to the part of the SRD where it states that Evil people oppress others. Even in the mildest sense of slavery, keeping innocents as slaves oppresses them. Therefore anyone who does that is committing an Evil act (and a fairly serious one at that) on an ongoing basis. A slave owner had better be doing some amazingly Good acts to counteract that level of Evil.

Corran

 

[Azul]

If I declare a random woman my property, it's meaningless. If I force her into my bed, it's another. In the same way, if I declare a man my property, it's meaningless. If I forcibly take him from his home and make him work for me and punish him for doing anything other than exactly what I want, it's another.

Who said anything about it necessarily being random? Throughout most of our history, slavery was usually a form of punishment - a loss of rights and freedoms. Modern ideas on imprisonment haven't always been the norm (and in fact many past societies would view the idea of long-term prison sentences as far more evil than slavery or execution).

Typically, people were enslaved in three ways: criminal punishment, prisoners of war, and indebtedness.

Most societies in history have not understood the concept of slavery to mean that a person was reduced to mere chattel (i.e. nothing more than property). Yes, slavery in the Southern US did do so and that colours our view of the concept. We tend to use terms like "indentured servitude" to avoid all the negative connotations of the word "slave". The word itself is very emotionally charged in modern English for this reason. What we first think of when we hear "slave" is the extreme, utterly dehumanizing form that reduced people to nothing more than chattel - a complete stripping of all dignity and rights. Roman slave owners would probably think the 19th century Southern plantation owners were evil too.

In historical terms, most other societies that practiced slavery recognized that slaves were people and treated them as such. Slaves simply formed the lowest social rung in those societies, owing both labour and lacking mobility.

Are you seriously arguing against slavery as being evil...by trying to claim that slavery is no worse than marriage? If you are referring to modern marriage, your argument is going to need a lot more clarification. If you're referring to medieval marriage, I don't think your comment disproves my position. Marriage was very close to slavery back then, and yes, forcing a woman to marry against her will was evil.Fair enough, and to put it more clearly from my perspective: I am convinced that slavery is evil. I see a very distinct difference between slavery and other historical institutions.

Modern Western marriage may still have some residual social imbalances but obviously, it's not slavery. Go back only a century and you'll find women didn't have the same social rights as men. Go back further and you'll see that they were not usually "free" in the same way as their male peers were. The lack of freedom is similar to that suffered by slaves, but it did not revolve around the right to profit from the other person's labour like slavery did.

Slave, serf, indentured servant, bondsman, prison work gangs (which exist today in many US states)... call it what you will, they are all just variations on the same theme - bonded servitude... a person with limited freedoms compared to a freeman with an obligation to provide labour to another. A serf is essentially a slave who comes as a package deal with a parcel of land. An indentured servent is a slave who you probably don't have the right to sell. A bondsman is the same thing, only probably he was taken in battle. Prison work gangs are essentially slaves, but their freedom is taken by the state directly.

All these ideas revolve around limiting a person's freedom and profiting from their labour. The name we use often reflects the degree to which the freedom is limited, but the terms aren't always very precise. The word slavery is usually used to mean the more severe forms on bonded servitude.

Roman slaves were often treated far better than medieval serfs or colonial era indentured plantation workers. An educated male Roman slave was usually treated better than any serf or even any modern prison inmate or even an 18th century housewife. He would often be a tutor entrusted with his owner's children and not infrequently, he would be granted his freedom late in his life along with enough wealth to actual enjoy his retirement.

The whole issue of slavery revolves around the concept of property and ownership. Basic property law tells us that property is rights not things. Your property is the bundle of rights you possess in regards to various things (e.g. land, food, livestock, whatever). Only in very recent times have people started assuming property meant absolute rights to something. Historically, it usually meant you had a limited set of rights in connection to something (e.g. a right to graze your livestock on a given plot of land). Today, we tend to think of property rights as being more all-inclusive, but we still see examples of how property rights are limited in scope (e.g. bank notes and coinage technically belong to the government, even if you think of it as "your" money; real estate often includes various easements or other limitations).

In assessing whether a particular variation on bonded servitude is evil, we have to look at what rights are taken away and given to someone else. That is the only reasonable way to assess exactly what a particular society means by the word "slavery". The Mamluks sure as hell didn't mean the same thing as the US south and neither did the Romans.

Each version of slavery encompassed different losses of rights and levels of oppression and cruelty and can only reasonably understood in the context of the society as a whole. Look at what slavery meant in that society (compared to being a freeman or just being Joe Average), not compared to what it means to be a modern Westerner. In many slave-owning societies, slavery was seen as a merciful alternative to something worse. To a modern Westerner raised to value liberty above all that sounds horrific, but in most historical societies, freedom as we understand it was pretty darn rare.

Essentially, instead of looking at the nasty sounding name for the social status, look at the actual condition of the people in that social status when assessing if their treatment merits being called Evil (in the absolute D&D sense).

Clearly they are vulnerable, in an inferior social status and owe labour to someone else. It is highly unlikely that this institution could ever be interpreted as Good. Denying freedom is unlikely to appeal to Chaotics (especially in regards to themselves). Obviously any form of bonded servitude is going to lean towards Law and Evil, but does it go all the way to being Lawful Evil or does it only get partway there (e.g. Lawful Neutral, Neutral Evil)? That depends on how it is done.

Only in egalitarian societies such as ours do we see a social statification as inherently evil. Very few societies have been egalitarian prior to the past few hundred years and even in recent history, we haven't always been so. We shouldn't confuse modern, liberal values with Good.

Good is not necessarily egalitiarian and freedom-loving... Chaotic Good is. Good in general is benevolent, altrustic, kind and loving, but it places no special value upon freedom (rather, it is oppression and cruelty it despises). Chaois is associated with freedom. Good isn't. See page 104 of the 3.5 PHB if you need a canon reference.

Lawful Good would accept differences in social status and civil rights, so long as in was in the context of a benevolent culture. Law sees a need for structure and hierarchy - some people in Lawful societies have more rights than others and some have less rights. This disparity becomes more glaring as you go from Lawful Good to Lawful Evil. Obviously, most forms of indentured servitude wouldn't sit well with most Lawful Good cultures because they are too oppressive and unjust. Maybe some "re-education" style servitude (like the original ideas behind penitentiaries) would fit for Lawful Good, but I'm not so sure.

Lawful neutral would tolerate some oppression but not systematic cruelty and abuse. A Roman style system could exist in such an environment, where slavery exists as an alternative form of punishment, is perceived as a kinder option than slaughtering a conquered people or as a way to pay off unpayable debts.

If such slavery provides social mechanisms that help avoid worse cruelty and if the form of slavery grants slaves adequate civil rights (i.e. akin to the rights we grant prison inmates or better), then I think it can fairly be argued that it is Lawful but not inherently Evil (in a D&D alignment sense). It presents considerable opportunity to do Evil, but the institution as a whole resembles our modern penal system more than the chattel slavery of the 19th century US.

If the system involves systemic abuse, then it is evil. If the system enslaves people for no reason (e.g. declaring that a "random" person is now a slave), then it is evil. If the rights taken away from the slaves are not balanced against the reasons for their enslavement, then it is evil (yes, this is a very difficult thing to assess and is prone to subjectivity; e.g. did that theft deserve the loss of rights X, Y and Z... and for that matter, how serious a crime is theft?).

If the system of slavery dictates that the children of slaves are also slaves, I would argue that the system is most likely evil (because it oppresses individuals who were not party to the actions that led to enslavement) but I can understand that some cultures view responsibility as a shared thing (e.g. a family is responsible for the actions of all its members). This latter point strongly conflicts with my modern North American personal worldview (i.e. individualism is a cherished value).

As for that real world worldview, I am personally a civil libertarian so ALL forms of bonded servitude are offensive to me. In real world terms, of course I think that slavery is evil. In D&D terms, I'd probably be best described as Chaotic Good in my social views. I also recognize that the values D&D calls Chaotic are things that I personally attach the idea of Good to. Freedom and equality are Chaotic virtues in D&D, yet in real life I consider them of the utmost importance. What D&D calls Chaotic, I call "Good". On a purely philosophical and political level, anything remotely resembling slavery is abhorent to me.

Even so, I am also a student of history and I recognize that across history the word "slavery" has meant many different things. Some forms of slavery were utterly inhuman. Other forms were unpleasant (slavery was almost never a desireable state) but were to some degree tolerable. The continuum from free man to being merely a piece of chattel has had a LOT of grey areas in our history. To my mind, when that grey gets too dark, that's Evil in D&D terms. When it is not so dark, it fails to be Evil with a capital E and is just a distasteful but Neutral institution.

Alignment isn't real world ethics. If real Evil is absolute, then many forms of slavery fit the bill while the lesser forms of bonded servitude are a slipperly slope towards Evil. Not Evil in and of themselves, but they can sure help you along towards it.