With a knock-knock! her father opened the door and gingerly stuck his head inside.
"Hey look! I got a new hat," he said with a smile, Imogen nesting in his frizzly coiffed hair.
Normally she would've shaken her head and called him a birdbrain or something but Hermione had other things on her mind.
"You wanna know why I put it on?" he asked after moment.
She just sat at the rickety desk that came with the room he'd rented for her.
"Are you alright?" he asked, coming in with a small cloth bundle in his hand. "You've been very quiet. Your shopping not go so well or was it the Spanish Inquisition who botched things up?" he asked, shooing the owl away to fly out the window as he sat on the bed.
"Would you ever eat a cat?" she asked, looking at him seriously.
"Why, do you plan to get one?" her bulging-eyed father asked in return. "I promise I won't eat any cat you happen to get," he said with his hand solemnly raised, "as long as it's hypoallergenic. Your mother's allergic to pet dander."
Hermione couldn't help but make a face, she had forgotten that. She chose a more serious topic instead.
"What about slavery?" she asked. "Do you think it's an inherently evil act?"
His eyebrows jumped to his hairline; that had done it. There was no way he could make a joke about that.
"Slavery as we know it was an absolutely abhorrent affair based on the systematic exploitation of other people as personal property," her father said seriously. "That's why we're well rid of it and there are those that work hard to make sure it isn't practiced, even in secret. But you've known all this for years, so why ask today of all days?" he ended curiously.
"Do you think it's possible that anyone would ever actually want to be a slave?" she asked instead of answering.
"Now you're stepping into a minefield," he said holding his hands up in front of him to ward off responsibility for the question. "I know you're only asking a hypothetical, but taken out of context some things that question implies could cause some really big problems."
"I'm not stupid, Dad," she said with a crinkled brow, fully aware of the sensitivity of the issue. "I just want to know how someone could be happier being a slave than being free."
"Well now," he said, looking rather relieved, "Happiness is a slightly safer shade of gray." His hair became a bit flyaway as he scratched his head to come up with one of his patented historical examples.
"You remember Martha, the secretary from work, don't you?" he asked.
"Yes," Hermione replied, curious at him picking something so recent for his example.
"Well, she has three kids and a mountain of debt, thanks to the deadbeat ex-husband of hers," her father said, gesturing with his hands at the enormity of the problem. "What I pay her keeps her bills paid, kids fed, and the creditors at bay - but it costs more than I want it to. That's why I'm going to slash her pay, fiddle with her schedule so she never gets close to overtime, take away all her benefits, and if she complains, I'll tell her she and her kids can starve for all I care; I want my money," he finished earnestly.
"You'd never do that," she rebutted.
"No, I wouldn't," he agreed with a smile. "But I could - if she had any of that that is - and people have, making the people who depend on them for their livelihoods miserable. For people near the bottom, they don't really have much choice, they have to do what they need to in order to survive, even if it's unpleasant, so many of them take jobs like that if they can find them. In the past it was worse, and in many places around the world it still is."
"So even though they're technically free to do as they please, they don't really have the option to since the misery their employer puts them through is less than what's waiting for them if they leave," Hermione said, summing up.
"Now," he said with a gleam in his eye, "imagine that we're a poor rural family living hundreds of years ago with no money to our name and only a small patch of ground to scratch a living from. But there's a drought," he said with a dramatic gasp, "and everyone around us has lost their crops. Our family is starving and odds are you'll be dead before the year is out, but then a rich traveling merchant offers-"
"-Offers to buy me and give me a wonderful life," Hermione said, rolling her eyes. "You're trying to say it's the quality of life and the conditions of freedom or servitude that's important."
"Only that in certain situations, there may be elements like that which have to be considered," her father said, seemingly unruffled that his period of make-believe was short-changed. "If the man fed you, clothed you, educated you, gave you a nice indoor job, and freed you with a handful of money after he died - as a parent, I'd have to say the deal was a good one. It'd accomplish everything I could've possibly hoped for: my child was taken care of and the future for you and your children would be brighter than it ever could've been if I'd kept you."
"And if he had lied, worked my fingers to the bone, starved me, beat me, took advantage of me, and sold me off for however much he could get later on then it was obviously a bad deal to make," Hermione said, illustrating the other side of the scenario. It sounded remarkably like what Dobby's life had been implied to have been like so far.
"Well, yes," her father agreed with a wibbly-wobble wiggle of his hands. "But you'd be alive, which is something which wouldn't have happened if you had stayed. There's a point where living in abject misery and abuse becomes worse than death, but how you judge it is rather nebulous. Regardless, it's the abusive form of slavery - the form it overwhelmingly takes - which led it to be condemned; that and the fundamental wrongness of treating human beings like property with no rights at all."
"What if they weren't human beings though and being free would kill them?" Hermione pressed.
"You mean like a robot?" her Dad asked curiously before giving her a look. "I've said it before, she may act like it sometimes, but your mother's not a robot and isn't staying with me because I charge her batteries every night."
"No, not robots," she said testily. "I'm talking about thinking, feeling, living beings."
"Hm, explain," he prompted in the one word way he had when he became really curious.
Hermione told him everything she had heard and seen that day when it came to house-elves, the treatment of Dobby, how other elves are supposedly treated in the magical world, and what Harry's lawyer had said about the centaurs and how it's best to treat everybody differently. It was a very long spur-of-the-moment lecture her father seemed content to absorb. Thankfully he kept his questions until the end.
"If one of them is mistreated, then why don't they just leave? And sure, everyone likes to feel welcome but how is that supposed to keep them alive? Do they die from not being liked? And why the compulsion to work; how do they gain energy by expending it?" her father asked in a rapid-fire way. "Is it work they feed on, the food Lawyerman hinted at, or the magic of the person they work for? And where do they sleep, some unused part of the attic? Oh! Are they like Brownies?"
.....
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