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20 sats \ 18 replies \ @fourrules 11 Dec \ parent \ on: A bunch of alarming shit BooksAndArticles
Renting people's reproductive capacity is abhorrent in the same sense as cannibalism. It's not like renting their labour. So yeah, end-times is on point.
Bryan Caplan occasionally does posts where he makes a big list of things that seemed abhorrent and hideously unnatural over the years, that now we don't think twice about. This seems like that, to me.
The bigger class of concerning things, imo, are things we don't think twice about now that our successors will one day look as monstrous in the same way we're stunned that our ancestors thought slavery was fine.
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things we don't think twice about now that our successors will one day look as monstrous
Hm. Wrt slavers, I think we can either excuse them because of moral relativism, or not, and say they should have known better.
Do you think we ought not to be excused for our follies on this principle?
Or maybe we should know better about certain things, making our behaviors inexcusable. Then I would wonder what these are as well.
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Or maybe we should know better about certain things, making our behaviors inexcusable. Then I would wonder what these are as well.
The only possible audience for such an audit is yourself; and therefore you're the only one who can say what's on that list.
I do wonder if most people go around, as I do, knowing they're doing terrible things, and do them anyway, because they can, because it's normal and nobody's stopping them, and they get by through a willful act of looking-away.
Or whether the wrongness doesn't even occur to them, and so there's nothing to look away from.
And I don't know which I think is worse.
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With respect to your contrarianism, a few more questions:
The only possible audience for such an audit is yourself; and therefore you're the only one who can say what's on that list.
If we agree to leave it up to the individual to judge the rightness/wrongness (or wrongness/more wrongness, as you seem to suggest) of their actions, then shouldn't we also establish what measuring stick they need to use?
If it's the same one, or at least similar, in the past and future, then haven't we contradicted ourselves?
If it is different, then isn’t that quite the quandary, since then the number of lashing owed to, say, the persecutors of Jean d'Arc, depended on how much we are willing to admit that our ruler looks the same as theirs?
As for what I think, if I compared my own wongness/more wrongness with theirs, I'd say I am still in good shape, because, at least to me, there does seem to be something definitely wrong about persecuting a teenager for her heresy in claiming to have had visions of Saint Michael.
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If we agree to leave it up to the individual to judge the rightness/wrongness (or wrongness/more wrongness, as you seem to suggest) of their actions, then shouldn't we also establish what measuring stick they need to use?
It depends on what the exercise is for. One could impose some set of moral axioms and reason forward from it, and say "this is how it should work" and make a rule set for how we should punish this or that. But others aren't likely to be bound by my logic, so I can't get very excited about the exercise.
You can get pretty far with some pretty basic stuff, though -- the golden rule is pretty good. It's relative, but it seems a stretch, in any era, to argue that people really don't see the problem with raping and murdering women in Juarez, or lynching negroes for moving into the wrong neighborhood. One can make the argument ("I'd expect the same if I moved into their place where I wasn't wanted") but I don't believe it.
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the bigger class of concerning things, ... are things we don't think twice about now that our successors will one day look as monstrous in the same way we're stunned that our ancestors thought slavery was fine.
You piqued my curiosity here.
I'd never really put the consequences of my actions under the microscope of this level of scrutiny.
Anyway, since we've come this far and we agree that others (especially our successors) likely won't feel bound by my logic or yours, then I'll admit that don't get very excited by discussing the limits of moral relativism either, since it feels a bit like playing a lose-lose game.
Self-examination, discernment, compassion, charity, understanding, the list can go on ... are principles of morality, besides the golden rule, that might be solid ground to stand on. (I am not sure how much these differ across the spectrum of belief systems.) I think if I am true to these, then how much does it really profit me to concern myself with the disapproval of my successors?
Over time our starting premises seems to change more than the logic itself.
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Renting people's reproductive capacity is abhorrent in the same sense as cannibalism
Why?
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First try to understand why cannibalism is abhorrent, malum in se, and rather than just abnormal.
If you find yourself justifying cannibalism you'll be able to justify buying babies like IKEA furniture.
But the truth is that children from surrogacy tend to feel that their surrogate parent exploited their real mothers. These feelings are gaslit, and in extreme circumstances the surrogate parents cut off the children the way they would never have been cut off by real parents.
Bottom line is that people literally cannot be owned or bought, and if you try to buy a child you're only renting the experience of parenthood, not the real thing, hence those relationships are emotionally easier to sever from both sides.
Renting or buying a person's labour is not exploitation if the person is getting better at something, increasing their own capacity rather than draining it.
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I still don't understand why you compare something that’s—in my opinion—pretty close to adopting children to people eating each other.
If parents don’t want their child and I adopt it, you think this is as abhorrent as me eating other people?
This is what I'm hearing, and tbh, it sounds quite ridiculous.
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Surrogacy is nothing like adoption if the parent isn't buying the child.
If you bought it isn't a possession. You own it. But that person you bought has free will, they literally cannot be bought, it's technically impossible. The relationship you have with the purchased child is nothing like the adoptive process for a child whose parents haven't had the capacity to raise them. The purchased child will silently or publicly reject the relationship in favour of the parent they lost, but the taboo against speaking out is enormous because the surrogate parents can and do withhold resources.
Purchasing the experience of parenthood is a scummy way to exploit people in poverty.
Notice that in adoption the adoptive parents are told to tell them that they have been adopted from an early age, and to explain the situation, and to enable bridges to their real parents if feasible. It wasn't like that in the past, but we learned. That's not the case with surrogates.
Listen to the video by Olivia Maurel.
Cannibalism is using a person as an object, consuming them. Modern surrogacy is a consumptive act, like buying furniture from IKEA.
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The relationship you have with the purchased child is nothing like the adoptive process
Have you been through an adoptive process? It's quite expensive. Significant amounts of money change hands before a baby ends up as the legal child of the adoptive parents. You don't have to like surrogacy, but the arguments you're making seem pretty tenuous to me.
I'm curious if you have similar feelings about broad swathes of the economy where people in dire circumstances take shitty jobs that nobody in less dire circumstances would ever take. For instance, there's quite the cottage industry in third-world countries paying people to adjudicate terrible videos of animals being tortured for fun, and the like. The psychological costs of this job are substantial, but presumably people in those circumstances think it's less bad than the alternative. Is this fine, or not fine?
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Being expensive isn't the same thing as purchasing a child, obviously.
If you're asking whether other forms of exploitation exist, then yes, obviously. You can exploit people for their meat, their attention, their wombs. None of these are categorically the same as offering a product or service that increases your own capacity and capabilities, your own power, the more you do it.
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Being expensive isn't the same thing as purchasing a child, obviously.
The distinction isn't as obvious to me -- or to most people, apparently -- as it is to you. Which is not itself a problem.
The problem would be if you think you've performed some devastating praxeological smackdown, which you have not. However, it wouldn't be my problem, so I'm content to let it alone.
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You're obviously trying to come to a conclusion that you want to come to. In adoption, do you pay the birth mother? Or do you pay administrators of the process? Are those administrators paid to deliver you a product or service, or to ensure that the child's interests are upheld which means potentially denying you the product you want to pay for?
This is obvious so what's you're agenda, why play dumb?