But that is not what Philmore is supporting: he is supporting voluntary slavery that is really “warranteeism”. To argue that people have a right to choose to be property is a big ask: particularly since it would also involve any children they may have being slaves as well. It was something of a standard “perk” of being a slave manager, for example. Including, of course, sex: slave masters famously enjoyed the sexual services of their slaves. If your body was property, so also were the services of your body. The only slave population that apparently did have a replacement rate fertility rate was in the antebellum South and there is reason to think even that has been exaggerated. Slaves had no family rights, a major reason why slave populations typically had fertility rates well below replacement and had to be “replenished”.
If you were property, then your body was property and the products of your body were property. Roman law as codified by Justinian recognised three ways of being a slave: capture, birth or self-sale. But, in either form of slavery, your children were also slaves. This second form of slavery has a certain level of tension, even contradiction, built into it.
So much so, that in antebellum Alabama, for example, slaves were recognised as persons for the criminal law (though for nothing else: they were otherwise property, to be bought and sold). Then there was what John Locke ( Second Treatise on Government, section 24) called ‘Drudgery’, which is slavery in the Jewish, Christian (and Islamic) tradition, where slaves were owned but limits were put on what masters could do to them. They were not even recognised by the criminal law, since their master was responsible for any criminal act they might perform. This was slavery in the Roman form, where a slave had the status of an animal and had no independent legal standing whatsoever. One historical version of slavery is what might be called “absolute slavery”, where a person is property completely. It is clear that Philmore is talking about something quite different in his “voluntary slavery” than the historical conceptions of slavery. In any discussion of human bondage, it is important to be clear about what particular form of bondage one is talking about, because the historical range (especially in what can be broadly called “serfdom”) is very large. Philmore (apparently a pseudonym for David Ellerman) in The Libertarian Case for Slavery (pdf) published in 1982. A particularly trenchant argument in favour of voluntary slavery was put by J. Some folk have argued that voluntary slavery is fine, notably Robert Nozick. If the only thing wrong with slavery was that it was involuntary, then voluntary slavery should be entirely fine and banning it is an infringement on people’s liberties to contract. The crucial problem was rather that slavery treated people as things, and so alienated what cannot be alienated. In a post, David Ellerman asks the question “why was slavery wrong?” and argues that being involuntary is not the crucial problem, since there were and are arguments for slavery being a quasi-contractual (and so consensual) arrangement and for voluntary slavery.