Are you a slaver?

I've often pondered the following question:

Ethical thinking has always been in evolution. People living in the late 19th century looked back with disgust upon their forebears for keeping slaves, but were in turn thought of as oppressors by people living a couple of generations later (for their suppression of womens rights).

In ancient Greece, even the greatest thinkers of all time took slavery for granted. This means that a keen mind is no guarantee that you will realize that you are doing great evil. If that evil is just taken for granted by "everyone", it is likely that you will never stop to question it.

This leads me to the following conclusion: There is no reason at all to assume that we are the first generation ever to have figured out every rights issue. In fact, based on at least 3,000 years of history, the probability is close to 100% that we are "slavers" - i.e. doing great evil without realizing it, just because our ethical thinking has not advanced far enough yet.

This is a shocking line of thought, and it is important that we have a lively debate to try and identify what we might be doing that we will later "regret" (even if from our graves).

I'll throw out a couple of ideas: Could it be the rights of our fellow primates that are our greatest ethical blind spot?

And after that, in maybe 100 years, AI rights?

Feel free to use the comment field for proposing other ideas - I'd love to hear them.