Abstract
Enslavement and exploitation continue today across the globe and the term human trafficking has become a contemporary catch-all phrase to include a variety of abuses. Exploitation under the umbrella of human trafficking is often framed as a new issue in today’s discourse, or as an exception to an otherwise innocuous world system of progress, democracy, and global capitalism. However, if we examine the thinking that has undergirded the various phases of slavery and other types of exploitation, we find a diversity of rationalization for the kinds of abuses common in various historical eras and today. This essay explores the writing of key philosophers often associated with the development of democratic society, particularly in Western Europe and North America. The essay connects the thinking that laid the foundation for the global slave trade of the colonial era to the thinking that supports the current systems of neoliberalism and global capitalism. Threads are traced across key philosophical work to illustrate some of the common assumptions made today in western civilization that set the stage for our current predicament of widespread human trafficking. The essay builds upon the argument that the rationalization of the global slave trade in the colonial era are still present, even if latent, in the rationalization of exploitation for global profit-making today.
 
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Highlights
Why would we assume that the thinking that undergirded the slavery of the past not continue today? Perhaps the philosophical frameworks of the past should be further interrogated in ways that we may not have considered prior, and could potentially offer ways of thinking our way out of the exploitation and enslavement we still see today
From our journey through some of the key philosophical foundations of our thinking in western society, we have some potential backwards facing lenses through which we can view the various rationalizations of enslavement and exploitation to antiquity
In Hobbes we see the naturalizing of servitude in civil society and sidestepping the inherent contradictions between his notions of liberty and his paternalistic In Locke, we see a bracketing of enslavement as outside civilized society and justified through acts of war and violence, which civil society does not govern, and in his own example as profiting personally from the slave trade
Summary
Looking to philosophers (Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Burke, Marx and Weber) may provide us with some insights into how exploitation in the form of slavery, exploitation and human trafficking have been rationalized. Aristotle’s ancient thought may seem internally contradictory to our contemporary sensibilities, but we can trace some of our contemporarily embedded social DNA back to these ideas of the natural and right order of things within capitalism, western domination in global economics, paternalism in the workplace and maybe even how some rationalize exploitation like human trafficking.
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