esn’t stop at the single case of slavery agreements; it carries us on towards compulsory diets, health police and other authoritarian paternalistic excesses that are a long way from respect for personal freedom and autonomy. Thoroughgoing liberalism, on the other hand, permits people to make self-damaging decisions so long as others are not directly and significantly harmed (as Mill himself agreed, about cases other than voluntary slavery). So even if we agree, for the sake of argument, that freely entering into slavery would necessarily damage the slave’s interests overall, we still would not thereby be compelled to accept, from a strong liberal perspective, that such acts should be impermissible. But in any case (as we’ve seen and will expand on later) there are good reasons to suppose that voluntary enslavement may be for some people the best choice in terms of their overall interests, given their available alternatives.The crucial point, however, is this: if individual freedom is a basic right, and if personal autonomy is an intrinsic good for human beings, then people must be allowed the scope to make life-changing, risk-taking, freedom-restricting, life-damaging and even life-ruining decisions. This is part of what it means to be a free and autonomous agent. To interfere in an individual’s choice to become a slave, therefore, would be to treat him in a manner inconsistent with respect for him as an autonomous agent. So the institution of voluntary slavery would not deny overall freedom to the slaves; on the contrary, it would respect their personal autonomy as expressed in their initial choices. 2. Since, under this proposal, slaves would mainly be recruited from the underclass, slavery contracts would not be agreements between free and equal partners. Many poor people would be more-or-less forced by their impoverished circumstances into slavery. Most decisions to enter slavery would fall so far short of id...
