Qui-Gon tells Shmi Skywalker, a slave asking him to help her also enslaved child, that slavery is not his problem.
To me, the greatest moral failing in the PT was the treatment of Shmi Skywalker. She gave up her only child to people who didn’t care enough about her to save her. She hoped that they would protect and care for him even as they refused to protect and care for her. Qui-Gon and Padme were on a time-sensitive mission to save an entire planet full of people and decided that Shmi’s sacrifice was an acceptable cost.
At no point after the blockade of Naboo was ended did Obi-Wan make an attempt to free the woman whose sacrifice gave the Jedi their Chosen One. He was okay training Anakin, but not okay making sure that the woman who loved him was safe. Even if the Jedi insisted on denying her any communication with Anakin per their code, they still could have freed her and set her up somewhere else. Or if the Council wouldn’t help, Obi-Wan could have gone rogue and freed her himself.
Or Padme could have freed her. Naboo was a rich and prosperous planet; even with the costs of rebuilding, there would have been enough money to free one slave. Padme could had said to her people “the reason we are alive is because of this young boy and his mother. Will you help me raise enough credits to secure her freedom? I can’t save all the slaves, but I can save her and use my political power to advocate for the freedom of slaves on a galactic scale.” Or Padme could have used her family’s money or her salary as Queen to personally pay for Shmi’s freedom. Or Jar-Jar (who also met Shmi) could have asked the Gungans for help raising money.
Anakin never held enough power to free his own mother. He was so scared of being rejected by the Council that he didn’t dare ask them for a favor. And so he too was failed by the responsible people who surrounded him, who were supposed to look out for his best interests. There was no reason why his mother had to be left in slavery just so Anakin could be free from all personal attachments.
Sometimes it’s hard for people to understand suffering on a grand scale when they are so far removed from it. But Padme and Obi-Wan saw Shmi and young Anakin’s pain up-close and took no action to fix it. If Padme and Obi-Wan and the Jedi could fail Shmi so painfully and completely, then of course they would fail others who live under shackles. Of course they would see no problem using clone troopers to fight their war. For characters that are noted for their compassion, where was the compassion for Shmi?
In the 2008 Clone Wars movie, Anakin is forced to go back to Tatooine on a mission which, you can tell, tears him apart. He is forced to return Jabba the Hutt’s kidnapped son to him.
On an ethical level, perhaps, that is not problematic, but when we think about it more, it is awful. A person who was once owned by the Hutts, the people who put a bomb in his head, was being forced to assist them, and to do so in such a way as to perpetuate and reinforce thier hold on power.
He was doing it because the Republic wanted the Hutt’s assistance to fend off pirates.
In other words, the Republic WAS prepared to intervene when it suited them. They were prepared to make deals with the Hutts to protect the people of the Republic. Of course, this came at the expense of the countless slaves on Tatooine.
This really is the inevitable consequence of counting some lives as being more valuable than others. Rebublic lives were more important that the lives of people from the Outer Rim. Republic lives, indeed were so important that they could not be risked on the battlefield and so millions of disposable humans were created for the purpose of fighting.
Millions of humans expected to fight for a Republic which did not grant them the rights of full citizens, and held them to be mere “property”. The Clone Wars did not save lives, it just put some lives before others. It created lives who were intended to be disposable, and had no value so that Republic citizens did not have to risk themselves.