I used to think so too, but the predominant scholarly opinion is that the abolition of slavery was very much a moral/cultural movement.

See What We Owe The Future for a recent discussion.

> In the book, he argues that what people value is far more fragile and historically contingent than it might first seem. For instance, today it feels like the abolition of slavery was an inevitable part of the arc of history. But Will lays out that the best research on the topic suggests otherwise.

> For thousands of years, almost everyone — from philosophers to slaves themselves — regarded slavery as acceptable in principle. At the time the British Empire ended its participation in the slave trade, the industry was booming and earning enormous profits. It’s estimated that abolition cost Britain 2% of its GDP for 50 years.

> So why did it happen? The global abolition movement seems to have originated within the peculiar culture of the Quakers, who were the first to argue slavery was unacceptable in all cases and campaign for its elimination, gradually convincing those around them with both Enlightenment and Christian arguments. If a few such moral pioneers had fallen off their horses at the wrong time, maybe the abolition movement never would have gotten off the ground and slavery would remain widespread today.

and

> Will MacAskill: The example that I focus on most in the book is the abolition of slavery. I go deepest into this because, firstly, it’s just the most important moral change that I know of — certainly among the most important moral changes in all history. And secondly, I think the case for it being, in some important way, contingent — that is, it could have gone either way, such that we could have current levels of technology and very widespread slavery — is much stronger than one might think.

> Will MacAskill: We certainly shouldn’t be very confident that current levels of technological development would lead to a society that had banned slavery. Maybe one thinks it’s 50/50. Maybe actually you think it’s more likely than not that we didn’t. And we talked about this more in the last podcast. I go deep into it in the book. One thing I should say is I’m not some philosopher, imperialistically going into history and then making all sorts of pontifications.

> Rob Wiblin: This was the view among people who’ve studied it?

> Will MacAskill: Yeah. I couldn’t say definitively what’s the median view among academic historians, but certainly the idea that the abolition of slavery was economically determined is very, very out of fashion among historians now.

> Rob Wiblin: I see.

> Will MacAskill: The general view is that it was a cultural change primarily. And then there’s a question of, why did that cultural change happen? Was it actually just really quite a contingent particular thing? There’s some real evidence for this. The fact that you really don’t see abolitionist campaigns occurring outside of Britain. Abolitionist sentiment, you don’t really see outside of Britain and France, and the United States as well.

> Will MacAskill: You look at the Netherlands, which in some sense was the first modern economy, and they had these petition campaigns that got almost no signatures. There was almost no abolitionist sentiment, almost no movement there. The Industrial Revolution could easily have happened in the Netherlands. It could have resulted in a very different kind of moral landscape.

from https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/will-macAskill-what-we-owe-the-future/

That being said, I agree that if we make better moral choices easier for people, they’ll make those choices more… as is the case with any choice with an easy option. So I am emphatically in favor of cultivated meat.

Those who think it’s obvious that a comparison to slavery or child exploitation is an exaggeration ought to re-examine their moral understanding of the world. Farmed animal suffering is one of the worst scourges of all time. Most people don’t think so, but most people also didn’t think so of slavery or child exploitation for the vast majority of history. That’s fine, it’s the nature of moral progress, and we’ll see how popular opinion changes in the long arc of the moral universe.