(June 24, 2015 at 12:18 pm)Won2blv Wrote: I know that this will get quickly shot down because of reasons like the fact that Kobe Bryant can walk away from basketball at any moment and he is free to roam about as he wants.It's not just that Bryant (or any athlete) has the freedom to walk away. It's that he entered into his NBA contract voluntarily. Bryant wanted to be a professional basketball player, and followed that desire through to its end. Pursuing a career and entering into contracts voluntarily isn't slavery.
I think the case against slavery would be one of the harm it does to people, in that they are being either imprisoned or forced to work against their will. Some will extend this to situations such as factory work in the USA before the advent of unions, where workers sought out jobs that required long hours and poor conditions for poor pay and even changing conditions (ie, they might wind up being asked to do work they did not sign up for, on threat of loss of pay or loss of the job). A case can be made that even that latter situation, which isn't slavery in the technical sense, is nonetheless harmful to people. Is it evil, or wicked, or immoral? I suppose most people would consider it to be.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
