tizens. Their basic social experience would be of a market economy, democratic political institutions and a liberal legal framework. So there is no reason to expect them to be morally any worse than members of the middle and upper classes are today. Indeed we could reasonably expect the new Master/Slave relationships to be more humanised than brutalised, because of the overwhelmingly liberal humanist socialisation of the new slave-owners. Far from slavery corrupting the slave-owners, the overarching liberal setting for the new form of slavery would influence the owners to be, if anything, excessively considerate to their slaves.***So there it is, then, the proposal of voluntary enslavement as a way of uplifting the underclass and providing opportunities for those on the border of social exclusion. History, we know, never repeats itself. We can’t re-create the past, nor should we try to, but we would be unwise not to try to adapt the good features of old institutions to new situations and problems while at the same time transforming their bad features. This is precisely what the proposal of voluntary slavery does.Those who labour in policy think-tanks have often been told to ‘think the unthinkable’ in attempting to devise solutions to current social problems. Slavery certainly counts as unthinkable at the moment, but it has been ruled out of contention by moral theorists and philosophers on the rather simplistic ground that it is, in principle, a bad thing. So is killing. However, just as most of us believe that we can have just wars, so too we could have justified enslavement, if there is no better alternative on offer. The scale of welfare dependency and the unaffordability of state welfare are major difficulties currently facing our liberal capitalist societies. The welfare state is not working; it cannot provide sufficient welfare and, furthermore, as most mainstream analysts now believe, it has morally pernicious e...
