IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2022 - 24

Commentary
Commentary
Human Flourishing, Servitude, and Why
They Are Incompatible
Josiah Ober
Department of Political Science,
Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94301 USA
[This article is an edited transcript of the talk given
by Prof. Josiah Ober as an invited speaker at the
Artificial Intelligence for Equity (A14Eq) Workshop- " Against
Modern Indentured Servitude, "
held as part of the 2021 International Symposium
on Technology and Society (ISTAS 21) on October
27, 2021.]
 In thIs talk [1] I'm going to address some specific
questions about servitude: What is wrong with
servitude, that is, as indenture in the form of bondage
or outright slavery? And what has that got to do
with artificial intelligence (AI), with social media,
and with the nature of the contemporary workplace?
Let me just begin with very obvious wrongs: The
cruel master who harms the servant in some overt
way, let's say by whipping or sexual exploitation.
This is clearly a moral horror and there is no reason
to debate that. But there are many forms of servitude
that are less explicitly awful. We can even imagine
ideally benevolent masters who do nothing to harm
their servants.
What's wrong with the master-servant relationship
in that case, if anything? A body of what is
called by academics " neo-republican " work on
ethics and political theory has tried to answer that
question by reference to the values of liberty or " just
freedom. " Work by Philip Pettit and Quentin Skinner
is exemplary and has been taken up by many others.
Their point is that a master exercises domination
even when not directly interfering in any way with
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2022.3173332
Date of current version: 14 June 2022.
24
0278-0097/22©2022 IEEE
the servant's choices. The problem is that the master
could always interfere. Benevolence is the master's
choice, not the servant's choice, so servants are
always subject to the master's choices which might
change at any moment. So, the servants remain, in
an important sense, unfree. They must always be
looking over their shoulder as it were, exercising
prior restraint on themselves in anticipation of the
interference that hasn't come yet, but always could
come later.
I think that the neo-republicans are on the right
track. But we can go further. So, I suggest that we
jump back a couple of millennia to Aristotle who in
The Nicomachean Ethics and The Politics develops a
full-featured argument about the wrongness of being
a complete human being in a condition of servitude.
Aristotle's theory shows that slavery is bad for the
enslaved person, which is true whether enslavement
is involuntary, that is the person taken as a slave
against their will, or voluntary, in which case the person
willingly chooses, by the habits of their life, to
live under the control of another.
Now there are many problems well known to philosophers
with Aristotle's account of freedom and
slavery: most notoriously, he thinks some humans are
slaves by nature, due to an ill-specified psychological
impairment. But Aristotle's thought has a good deal
of value for us today. Indeed, some of the value for
us comes from the most problematic part of Aristotle's
theory: his argument for the necessity of natural
slaves. We'll get to that at the end of this talk. The central
value of Aristotle's philosophy for thinking about
the wrongness of servitude lies in his account of what
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2022

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2022
