Slavery and More

     I have been brought up with the idea of slavery being something that is negative. I look at Thomas More’s Utopia and wonder if I can fathom the idea of slavery being a tool rather than an atrocity. I see that the possibility of people paying off their debt to society as something that I may not want to accept as a necessarily good idea, but there are little options when people transgress against their society.

     For example, we have jails and prisons to rehabilitate people who owe society for a wrong-doing. We have hospitals to rehabilitate people who are ill (specifically mentally ill). We have schools to teach people to conform to societal norms so that people will not fall into the category of transgression. We also have people that are so impoverished that slavery would be a better option than dying of starvation.

      When I take a look at these factors I realize that although I may not necessarily agree with everything that More says, I realize he has thought through a plan for an Utopia and that plan is better than no plan at all. So, before I jump to a conclusion where I view Thomas More’s Utopia in a negative light, from the perspective of how I was raised, I must look deeper into the functions of society so that I can realize some other factors that I did not see before.

      So, instead of the breaking up of families, starvation, torment and the other disparities that come from the institution of slavery, I propose that a work study program be instilled. It would be more beneficial if we could put these people into a career path and allow them to become upstanding citizens of society. We would require a mandatory sentence to rehabilitating education that leads the citizen to become a working unit of society.

     The mandatory sentence would work with people who are doctors who can inspect the citizen’s mental well-being so that the transformation of the individual not only is physical, but psychological as well. This insures that people are working together. It makes a system of education and checks and balances that hold the individual responsible for being the best citizen he or she can be.