>Why should we care about some long-dead slaves' opinion about what is good or bad?

Because they had a more direct experience of it than we can ever have.

I think the (even if implicit) claim that it is better to physically harm, rape, and kill slaves than to be nice to them is highly questionable.

Yes, both are bad situations, but adding additional physical violence doesn't make things better, only worse.

Edit: I guess I should also add that we can never truly know what someone else's experience was. It is especially difficult to know if all you have left after hundreds of years is some text.

I guess my own position is tainted by the belief that slavery is fundamentally wrong as a restriction of freedom, not as a matter of being beaten. So if I were a slave, though I would personally prefer not to be beaten, I would also prefer slavery be seen as a vile practice, and if I have to take a few beatings to make that be known, I would take them.

The alternate of nobody being beaten, but still being slaves where everybody is waffling and unsure about whether slavery is bad because nobody is being beaten seems to me a bit like a losing proposition. It's the same reason we can't do effective political reform today: people will choose their own convenience when they're not facing a visible evil as a group.

The last thing I would want is for people to think I got beaten because I'm a "naughty slave" or because my owner was a particularly bad guy. No, the reason I got beaten was because I couldn't choose my path. Because I was a slave, and slaves can't choose not to be beaten, even if they would prefer it. When a slave gets beaten, he or she is beaten by slavery as an institution, not by some violent individual.

How much different would the world be if Hitler had announced from day 1 his play to conquer Europe and massacre millions of people? Heck, if we had ended slavery 100 years earlier, maybe we'd be 100 years closer to managing global warming. We don't have time for evils to fester in the margins pretending to be nice.

I remember a couple years ago there was some politician saying we don't need minimum wage laws because companies already pay more than that, so the law is redundant. And in the name of "small government" declared that we should remove the law from the books. All because his favorite corporations are "nice slaveowners" who don't beat their slaves, he thinks that there's nothing wrong with destroying a very important institutional protection.

I do not consciously support slavery. I just find some objection to the apparent false dichotomy that beating slaves is a sound path to their freedom.

If (and it's a very big if), the only way to end slavery is to have slaves be beaten, then you might have a good point. However, I can think of no way to verify that, nor can I think of any evidence in support of that premise that can withstand even most most basic scrutiny.

>How much different would the world be if Hitler had announced from day 1 his play to conquer Europe and massacre millions of people?

How do you know he didn't?

Would you allow yourself to be beaten if it meant your children could be free? Or would you rather let your children be slaves and neither of you be beaten?

This isn't just about slavery: it could apply to any war-like situation. But if you aren't being beaten as a slave, how are you resisting slavery? Your owner just lets you get away with not doing what you're told?

Because I really don't see how not resisting is supposed to end slavery, and I don't see how avoiding beatings is any kind of resistance.

Surely there are other ways to resist slavery than being beaten?

If there were some highly effective and rapid communication system, for example, the slaves could possibly organize and GTFO before their owners had any way to stop them. Yes, there's the chance that it could turn bloody, but I can imagine scenarios where it might end peacefully (as far as one can imagine such a hypothetical).

Even if such a thing were possible, it seems highly unlikely that a bunch of slaves could pull it off successfully. How's a slave going to gain access to a high-speed communication network in a way that doesn't immediately prompt retribution?

Slaves are either compliant or tortured for not being compliant. That's why slavery is so brutal; if your owner doesn't beat you, he'll either kill you or sell you to someone who will. There's really no other option for dealing with a slave who refuses to obey. (And I don't see how a compliant slave can help end slavery.)

> I can imagine scenarios where it might end peacefully

How? People who legally own slaves aren't going to just let their slaves walk away anymore than any company now is going to let their employees walk away with all their profits.

> How do you know he didn't?

In particular, Mein Kampf comes pretty close.

Do you think you would be the same you if you had been born into slavery?

I don't think that's a useful hypothetical. If I were born into slavery, I would be a different person, and I can't tell you what that person would think.

Yes, that was my point. You had written as if that were not the case.

I was telling you what I actually do think, not what someone else might think. That is, knowing what I know now, I would say what I said. If you are asking me if I would agree with that while not knowing what I know now, then obviously I can't say, because I would know things that I don't currently know.

Regardless, I can't make decisions using information I don't have, so the question is pointless.