Would it be immoral to enslave someone, that was genetically engineered to want to be a slave?

Creating a genetically engineered underclass would be immoral.

If they wanted to be a slave, then are you really enslaving them? In essence, they’re freely getting what they want – and that is not an attribute of slavery.

Sure why not, society does it all the time with poor people.

Yes. If it was a mechanical contrivance it would be different.

You mean like a dog?

Have you read The Golem and the Jinni, by Helene Wecker? It includes a thoughtful exploration of a related question in the form of a golem who has lost the master she was created to serve. What is she, then, and what can or should she do?

There’s also the Grand Inquisitor scene of The Brothers Karamazov, in which (as best I can recall) Ivan argues that humanity prefers subjugation to freedom because the power of choice is an intolerable burden.

I don’t know the answer to your question, but an enlightened view of BDSM might hint at it, if my limited knowledge is accurate. It’s an interesting puzzle.

It would really depend. Do they willingly want to be enslaved because they don’t want the trouble of having to make decisions? Or is it because they don’t understand that they can impose their own will and wants? If it’s the first, then it’s not enslavement really. This is their will. If they feel they have no real choice of living any other way because it’s all anyone has ever told them, then it is immoral.

The fact the victim “wanted it” is irrelevant to whether or or not slavery is morally justifiable. It is exactly equivalent to an argument that I am blameless if I can prove my seduction by a 12 year old, or that I killed a man because he begged me to do it.

Did you ever see the TV series Humans? It’s about robots that are made to serve humans, who look just like humans, and they can be bought and sold. The problem is some of them become consciously aware, and begin to feel abused and want out. Some of them had been used and abused, and some had been treated fairly well.

I think creating a human to be a slave is immoral in the first place. If slave people did exist, it’s still immoral to treat them as a thing, or to treat them as less than human. I think when it crosses the line a second time is if the “masters” can literally own other people or buy and sell them.

It reminds me of cultures where a woman is married off at a young age. As a wife she does all the work at the house, has to have sex with her husband on demand, and doesn’t have the financial ability to leave. Even if she is born into that custom, socialized into that custom, and even if she thinks she wants that life, I still say that is not acceptable in society.

As I write this, it’s simply wanting a slave that I find reprehensible. I just don’t understand it. I’d love to have help at my house, like a maid, or help with a business I’m running, but free help where the person has no choice but to obey me, and live with what I provide, it’s not attractive to me at all. It just feels wrong. I have a hard time watching horses have to obey their owners to take them riding, or pull a wagon. I’m not so sure the horses really want to do it.

Sounds like Brave New World, where everyone was programmed to be happy with their station in life. The thought of engineering people’s desires goes beyond immoral to the totally creepy.

Let’s say someone who wants too be enslaved works for a farmer.
He was genetically engineered to want to be enslaved.

Therefore, the person who enslaved him is the person or people who genetically engineered this trait into him, not the farmer who takes advantage of this.

I have posted this link before, but it is worth repeating. Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel gives a pretty good argument against genetic engineering. I agree with @filmfann that once the genetic engineering is used, the damage has been done.

Well, he certainly wasn’t talking about a cat @Caravanfan!

I think it would be. There are so many things to consider. What kind of slave and for what reason?

@stanleybmanly A 12 year old isn’t old enough to know they can have a different life. They are not mentally mature yet.

Which makes her seduction of me a legal impossibity. My participation makes the event statutory rape, for which I must be prosecuted.

You have lost your mind @stanleybmanly. A normal 12 year old doesn’t know how to seduce. If any man thinks that’s what they’re doing, then they’re imagining things that they want to see.
Sick.

Good point. I picked 12, but it might just as well be 15 or 17 depending on where you live. The same assumption applies, that the girls involved are too young to know what they are doing. Ergo, they cannot seduce me.

The scary thing is, they don’t even know that they’re doing anything. In fact, often that AREN’T doing anything. They might be walking along the street thinking about a math problem, and some perv is going to see it as she’s being provocative, when she is being no such thing.

Slavery is a legal/social condition, not a somatic feature, and therefore not something that can be bred for. You can breed for certain mental, behavioral, and personality traits, such as low IQ, enjoyment of repetitive strenuous exertion, submissiveness, and timidity, but you can’t breed a person to want to to have the legal status of property.

Conceivably, some of those other traits might manifest as wanting that status under certain conditions, but that would not change the fundamental moral difference between persons and property, which no amount of genetic manipulation can erase, short of breeding away the traits that make an organism a person at all and reducing them to some sort of sub-personal animal, in which case their desires would have the same moral status as animal drives. But then they would still merit at least the same moral consideration that we extend to animals.

A breeding program that was designed to have either of those outcomes—(a) persons whose psychological traits might predispose them to want to be treated like property, or (b) human-derived sub-personal organisms—would be immoral, and by extension, treating the bred entities as literally property would be immoral regardless of their desires.

More generally, I think a Kantian approach works best here: it is always wrong to treat a person as means to an end, not an end in themselves.