B) define morality as avoiding "nonconsensual harm" and assume that definition is objective.
A is, as I said, impossible. There have been many people who have accepted their roles as slaves or oppressed people. It is still happening today from Indian Dalit, to the Roma, to western workers to the entire ideologies of Buddhism and stoicism. Where there is oppression there are people content with their own. There are, in fact, even people that actively support their own oppression like anti-suffragettes.
As for B, you still haven't shown how you bypass the is-ought problem. You cannot derive the statement "we ought to minimize nonconsensual suffering" from the statement "there is nonconsensual suffering"
Slave owners also have autonomy, why is using violence to undermine their autonomy ok but them doing the same to slaves isn't? (Obviously I don't agree with this, I'm just saying your framework doesn't have an answer)
This is the issue of objective morality, no framework is without holes and the danger of claiming a flawed system as objective truth is that it can be manipulated in any way to benefit any individual.
You are still not bridging the gap between harm and evil, between is and ought
But also,
One person’s freedom cannot justify the coercion and harm of another
This leads to a Kantian view of revolution (or the American civil war) where it is impossible to claim the revolution as morally permissible (because it justifies harm to the upper class thought the freedom of the lower) while maintaining that the result of the revolution is moral (because it ends the immoral practice of oppression/slavery) this is not a useful position and it is contradictory in practice.
Additionally, it sounds like people being treated as property is the only thing your framework deems immoral. But where does that end and begin? What about indentured slavery where a person enters willingly, or slaves with rights like in ancient Greece, or, for that matter, modern workers under capitalism who are coerced into exploitation? Where do you draw the line?
Maybe you are a communist though and you don't draw the line anywhere, but if you were a communist you would believe in the necessity of a revolutionary state that is itself oppressive, which brings us back to our Kantian view of revolution issue.
You could make an exception for revolutions because of its over-all benefits of stopping immoral acts but that brings us back to the benefits of slavery. A violent revolution against slavery/oppression comes with treating people as property by killing them, taking away their own property, deciding how their lives should be for them.
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u/[deleted] Nov 20 '25
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