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If you could press a button to change the past such that the slave trade to America never began, would you do it? Assume memories are changed so that nobody, including you, knows you pressed the button, and roughly the same people exist, just in diff timelines.

Yes
80.1%
No
19.9%

3,344 votesFinal results

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I cannot conceive of why anyone would press the No button

Aella

@Aella_Girl

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@miniver

One possible argument is that in this alternate reality, America might be significantly more white/homogeneous than it would be now, and there might be greater income discrepancy between white and black people.

5:30 AM · Aug 29, 2020

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I suppose. Unknown and unknowable differences compared against the known moral weight of slavery and its aftermath. Seems like the easiest of easy calls to me.

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and

I agree it’s an easy moral call when framed that way. But aren’t you also eliminating generations of relatively well-off African Americans post-slavery and subjecting them to a relatively worse life in Africa?

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and

If questions like this are actual moral conundrums, how could we ever prevent a murder or rape or enslavement? "Better just let that murder happen, who knows if it'll turn out to be a good thing down the line!" ???

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and

That already exists my dude. Not to virtue signal but I don’t think that the difference in income discrepancy between our timeline and no slavery timeline is significant enough to justify no slavery.

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and

And it's quite possible slavery would never have been abolished in the West. It's still rampant across Africa and Asia, with about 30 million in slavery in Africa alone (60x more than ever went to N.America).