"Not have kids, probably."

"They have kids because other people want slaves?"

"They have kids when they anticipate there'll be enough work for the kids to do."

"...and work that didn't happen to involve slavery wouldn't count?"

"It'd be a hard sell, you might eventually get somewhere with some of them."

"There're a lot of things that should really be higher priority. Maybe when you give them longer lives they change, too, hard to say."

"How long do house elves live?"

"Like fifty years?"

Nod. "Do they develop very much over time - how good at learning things are they -"

"They don't let us meet them until they're at maturity, they can learn new information plenty fast but they pretty rarely learn new - ways of thinking about things - they get more emotionally invested, as they get older?"

"Invested in?"

"The family they work for, usually? Sometimes a specific member thereof, the Hogwarts ones are loyal to the institution..."

"I mean, there's - There would be nothing wrong with them choosing to cohabit with people they care about and do many or all of the household chores since they like them. What about the arrangement causes it to be best conceptualized as slavery?"

"Well, they have to obey us - magically bound to - they usually want to, but still, they don't get a choice - they punish themselves for failing, I don't think they do that because they want to, exactly -that you can talk them out of by being really insistent that it is upsetting to you -"

"...how much is known about the nature of the magical binding, would they object to its absence if nothing else changed -"

"You can end it by giving them clothes and that upsets them tremendously, they will usually drink themselves to death, I don't know if being free feels unpleasant in itself and if you just silently removed the bindings what would happen..."

"Can they be asked, would they know?"

"They panic at any discussion of freeing them. Maybe they'd panic less if it were someone asking who didn't have the authority to do it -"

"Do they have an opinion on - the human slave trade?"

"Doubt it, wizards don't practice that. Or - not systemically."

"I wonder if that would be informative without distressing them."

"I'd be happy to go fetch an elf for you to talk to."

"I'll put it on the to-do list."

"Does the problem with human behavior towards more primitive humans mean that we can't put evacuees from different human worlds on the same planet, or would it be fine if none of them are in positions of authority -"