Fiction:PGPS/Dedication is not Enslavement

Dedication is not Enslavement, By Puno Ironsun

The Aeoneonatrix Rite of dedication is one of the most misunderstood and maligned religious rites in existence. It is widely condemned as a form of religious enslavement or oppression. Virtually every person who is even vaguely aware of the rite of dedication, who has not taken it themselves, condemns it on these grounds. The actions which the Aeoneonatrix Empire takes to encourage dedication among its citizens are decried as evil and oppressive for these reasons. I intend to persuade you, however, that these criticisms are unfounded. Instead, I assert that the rite of dedication is neither slavery, nor, if it were, would it be immoral on that account.

It is true that the rite of dedication does have one thing in common with slavery: it involves property ownership of a sapient being. If one’s definition of slavery is simply “the ownership of a sapient being as property,” then it is tautological that the rite of dedication is a form of slavery.

However, “the ownership of a sapient being as property” is a poor definition of slavery. Firstly, to accept that definition in full, we must concede that various things which apparently are slavery are not. For example, say there was a government which, after a certain amount of money was due after a certain amount of time, forced debtors to work for and obey the every command of those they owed to. These debtors are treated poorly. Their masters have every right to beat or even kill them, and to extract from them any labor they desire. However, according to the written law of the nation, these laborers are not property of the persons in question. Instead, they are fellow citizens who have forfeited certain rights and been given certain duties due to their financial condition. Would those debtors be slaves?

It is not an entirely hypothetical scenario. Countless civilizations have systems similar to the one I just described. These people are widely regarded as enslaved by sapient rights groups, academics and international organizations. However, by the definition given above, such persons would not be slaves.

There is a possible counter to the above point. One could argue that the above definition of slavery is valid, but partial. That is to say, they could say that slavery includes all cases where a sapient being is property, but also includes other cases where a person is forced to work. This definition, where the other one was narrow, is seemingly overbroad. According to it, an armed robber who forces a bank teller to hand over a bag of currency is enslaving said teller. They are forcing the teller, at gunpoint, to perform an action, one which might be difficult if the bag in question is heavy or they are forced to move it a large distance.

Instead of either of these flawed definitions, I wish to propose a definition of slavery which matches our intuitive grasp of what slavery is, and what most people mean when they use it. Slavery, I assert, is “an act in which persons or organizations trade amongst themselves the moral right, in the eyes of some party, to commit actions against another person which, were they committed against otherwise similar non-members of the slave class, would not be permitted.”

By the definition I just gave, every system seems to be slavery or not slavery in accordance with our intuitions. For example, the debtors I mentioned earlier would be slaves, because the right, recognized by the government, to harm them, is traded between persons. Likewise, the bank robber example does not constitute slavery because the labor of the bank teller is not traded between organizations. If another criminal were to pay the first robber for the gun and begin forcing the teller to work for them instead, then that would constitute slavery.

Now that we have a working an intuitive definition of slavery up and running, let us apply it to the rite of dedication. Distilled into points, my definition required three things. First, that a thing, to qualify as slavery, must be an act. Second, it must involve persons or organizations trading the right, in the eyes of someone, to commit certain actions against another person. Third, such actions must be forbidden to be performed on persons not considered slaves. My argument is simply this: the things which the Cleanser does with the dedicated are not violations of their moral rights, and therefore his actions are not slavery.

What does the Cleanser do with the persons whose souls he is given? Well, he controls our motor functions so as to prevent them from or force them to engage in behavior necessary to prevent harm from coming about. He causes us to experience qualia which persuade them to behave differently so as to benefit others, even if we do not want to. He punishes us for moral wrongdoing. He brings our souls to a specific place to give us just and humane afterlives. He expects us to obey his orders.

None of these are violations of our moral rights. First, it is not a violation of a person’s moral rights to prevent them from causing harm to others. When he temporarily deactivates our motor neurons to prevent us from harming others, his actions are analogous to a person tackling another person who is attempting to murder a third and physically stopping them. This carries over to cases where the person is compelled to action, because in such cases, the Cleanser is preventing them from violating another’s right, say, to have their lives saved, or to be rescued from slavery, by neglect.

Second, the Cleanser, it must be recalled, is, legally, the sovereign of the Aeoneonatrix Empire. According to the Aeoneonatrix Empire’s constitution, the Empire reckons any person who validly takes the rite of dedication to be a citizen of the Empire, regardless of what additional citizenship they might maintain elsewhere. Because all valid rites of dedication are taken willingly, this cannot be compared to a tyrant who declares a random person a citizen of their empire and then begins to act against them.

Now, three of the items on my list are things the rulers of societies are widely recognized as having the right to do to their people. First, ordering them to take or avoid an action. States have the moral right to pass laws according to anyone you ask, save perhaps for an anarchist. Hence, as a political ruler, the Cleanser has the right to give orders to his citizens. Laws are also regularly passed in various states requiring persons to experience, read, or see certain things, so this also justifies cleansing. If children may be required to attend a field trip, persons contemplating immoral behavior may be required to be shown material which will persuade them otherwise. This is not analogous to the way a tin pot dictatorship treats its citizenry, but more so to the American President’s power to issue executive orders. For both the Cleanser and the President, there are limits on what he may order them to do. The American President is limited by the United States Constitution. The Cleanser is limited by the League of Patron’s code of ethics.

The right to punish citizens for violation of law is also implicit in the Cleanser’s role as the head of the Aeoneonatrix Empire, lest we concede that every last jail in the galaxy be emptied. Some might assert that the problem with his punishments is not that they occur, but that they occur without due process, but this is not the case. Trial by jury is only a necessary part of due process because fallible mortals cannot always discern a person’s guilt. For an omniscient being, this is moot. There is no need to discern the guilt of a person, for it is known. Further, as the sovereign, he has every right to dictate the sentence which is carried out, according to the Aeoneonatrix Constitution. Finally, Aeoneonatrix are always warned before committing any immoral behavior, so the punishment cannot be regarded as an instance of ex post facto law.

Third, it is no violation of one’s rights to give them an afterlife they willingly accept. By that standard, no god may give his followers an afterlife. Some might complain that the Cleanser does not warn all who take the rite that he intends to take their souls, but any reasonable person ought to be able to infer this from the fact that to take the rite is to give one’s soul to a god. Also, the vast majority of those who take the rite are in the Aeoneonatrix Empire, and know perfectly well about the afterlife.

While the Cleanser does, indeed, trade in the right to treat us in a specific way, it is no way he would not be morally justified in treating others. All of those actions are taken under at least some circumstanced by other members of the league on persons who have taken nothing analogous to the rite of dedication, so it cannot be argued that he is trading the right to do it in their eyes. He is playing it safe, but he could make an ethical case for every action he takes with us even if we were not his.

However, there is another point to be dealt with. Let us disregard the meticulous argumentation I have laid out and suppose, for a moment, that the rite of dedication is a form of slavery. Does that make it immoral? To answer this question, we must ask why slavery is immoral.

Slavery is immoral in almost every case because it involves harming sapient beings by either forcing them to do work unwillingly or punishing them for their failure to do said work. Furthermore, this harm is not cancelled out by greater harm prevented by the act. While it is true that the Cleanser sometimes harms us, he does so in his capacity as a political ruler as noted earlier, and, in every case, it is to deter harm which we might otherwise do to others. This, quite simply, is analogous to law as argued earlier, not slavery. What orders he gives us, he gives us in the same capacity, and these orders are always just, meaning that he is in the right to give them.

In addition, such orders never center around back-breaking, long, or otherwise insufferable work, unwilling sexual submission, or having one’s life risked or treated as non-valuable or unimportant. Even if the rite of dedication were slavery, it would be slavery only by semantic technicality. One might as well protest to being fed harmless poison, or being the victim of an honest fraud. Even if you find some semantic trap which makes those things non-contradictory, the complaint is founded in semantics, not any real tangible wrong done to the dedicated or anyone else.

In contrast to actual instances of slavery, the dedicated are not beaten regularly to suppress dissent among them. They are not killed, raped, or tortured arbitrarily. They are not deprived of worthwhile lives, nor, indeed, is their quality of life decreased in any way. In fact, the quality of life for the dedicated is better, because the Cleanser offers us guidance which allows us to better succeed. I would not hold the university position I do if the Cleanser had not helped me decide to attend the university I did and not the other one, which seemed the right choice at the time, but which would have closed down in the middle of my education had I attended it, causing me to have wasted three years, which would result in me not obtaining my PhD until the position I currently hold would have been filled.

In conclusion, the rite of dedication, by any proper definition, is not slavery. Furthermore, even if it were, it possesses none of the properties which render slavery immoral.

Comments
Use Message Templates