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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Azul" data-source="post: 1918913" data-attributes="member: 11779">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.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.</blockquote>

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