Recently I was seated in a restaurant for breakfast while CNN was airing on a nearby TV. The anchors were soliciting Facebook feedback to the question they were posing to various audiences. The question was: "How can we finally eradicate slavery from the modern world?"
A man in Nigeria responded that the only way to eradicate slavery was to take all the wealth from rich people and redistribute it to the poor people.
A college-aged female responded that in order to eradicate slavery, we must provide jobs for everyone so that they have a purpose.
While these are interesting responses and we could discuss the positives and negatives of these potential solutions, each of these is based on a supposition of the cause of slavery. More interesting to me, however, is the supposition behind the initial question, "How can we finally eradicate slavery from the modern world?" The underlying, unstated assumption is that slavery is bad; this leads me to ask, "Why is slavery bad?"
Fundamentally, I agree that slavery is bad, however, that is because I have a Christian worldview in which humans have inherent value and purpose which is given them by the Creator. Ignoring this and reasoning from the point of view to which our society has in general subscribed, namely atheism, and that we are the products of cosmic accidents, I am unable to substantiate that claim. We are hard pressed to find any intrinsic value in human life which leads us to the relative morality that allows us to abort babies and perhaps take the lives of those who do not have what we esteem to be a 'good' quality of life.
But following this same path of reasoning, it becomes more obvious that if our origins were not ordered, then our lives are the result of billions of cosmic accidents every day and over the past 4.0+ billion years. In fact, the atoms and molecules that comprise me are unique from those that form you and may cause me to act in a way that you perceive 'bad'. In reality, my decisions are nothing more than cosmic accidents waiting to happen. Each individual is independent even though we may all share some general notion of the same moral code.
Without some universal guiding force, though, why does a ruling majority decide what is acceptable and what is not? We have no inalienable rights endowed to us by the cosmos, we are nothing more than animated objects; we have no value and no purpose other than what we elect by the collision course of particles in our bodies and minds. So, I ask again, "Why is slavery bad?" The answer from this perspective is the most hated response from all generations of children, "Because I said so," except in this case, these aren't your mother's words, they are society's words.
