I wouldn't think the Roman empire was a good thing if we had it today. We can "respect" those older cultures in their context while still recognizing that they were in many ways horrifying by modern standards.
Of course one practical issue you run into is that while Aurelius was perhaps one of the greatest leaders of all time, his son and heir - Commodus, was perhaps one of the worst of all time. But at least if we speak of the eras prior to its decline, Pax Romana in particular, I don't really see how the Roman Empire would be horrifying. And in any case dramatic deterioration of the quality of public leadership, probably presaging a more broad decline, is clearly not limited to systems of minority rule.
When Julius Caesar conquered Gaul it was said he killed one million people and enslaved another million, and was celebrated for it. The actual numbers may not be accurate, but the sentiment probably was.
Moral relativism aside, would you like to live in a society where killing civilians during war and enslaving survivors were both acceptable?
Or how about the the abandoning of unwanted babies:
* https://academic.oup.com/book/6954/chapter-abstract/15122509...
* https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/15d74av/how_...
Post-industrialization (kind of assuming they'd have access to modern tech here), slavery makes very little sense - even completely ignoring the ethical issues. Pay a negligible hourly/monthly cost to hire a skilled worker that can be easily replaced or dismissed as desired, or pay a huge up-front cost to take on somebody who is probably low skill, may or may not work out, and then be 100% responsible for all of their needs and other costs going forward? They'd likely outlaw it just like every other country that's gone through industrialization has.
Similarly exposure (which began to be phased out and moving towards adoption once Christianity took hold in Rome) was once again largely a product of technology. Abortion was extremely dangerous in those times for the mother, and exposure was one way it was done relatively more safely. And children were often exposed because of various deformities or their sex which, again, can now be detected at a prenatal stage. Though the sex issue again gets back to a lack of technology. Son's worked and essentially were your pension, whereas daughters joined the house of whoever they married, to say nothing of dowry related issues.
Obviously we have to do a lot of speculation to imagine what a Roman Empire in modern times would look like, but I don't think many of the knee-jerk reactions to it are really justified.
we have yet to solve either problem, regardless of whatever new terms we come up with to describe the plight.