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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   33444 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025

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is it moral to buy children, or is it not?

Of course it is. It's immoral and selfish to deny them life. Do you accept this consequence of your stance?

What is your actual justification? A vague appeal to sacredness("not a business practice.")? Personal feelings of disgust ("I cannot adequately express how vile I find this practice.")? "Objectification"? Forced acceptance that life sucks ("That’s just the way it is.")?

You cannot deny life to something that does not exist. If you think it’s selfish to not have as many children as you possibly can, by all means make your case to the childless and I’ll help as best I’m able.

In the meantime, I justify my position both innately and consequentially:

  1. Sex, pregnancy, childbirth, and the relationship between a mother and her child is one of the most ancient and holy things that we as humans do, and profaning it in this way is deeply, deeply evil. I know that you won’t find this convincing, but I’m putting it first because it’s true and to get it in the open.
  2. I strongly suspect that a child created in this way will suffer compared to one that isn’t. The bond between mother and child is at least partly chemical and hormonal, established during pregnancy. A woman who has not bonded with her child in this way, but instead ordered it from a service, is likely to be a worse mother and also to be unable to offer the child the unconditional love it needs to grow into a healthy adult. @George_Hale’s anecdote bears this out. On the child’s side, babies are sensitive to their mother’s odour, touch and voice (learned in the womb), which helps to soothe them after the incredibly stressful process of birth (which we know from measurements of adrenaline). Having a baby’s first experience be that of permanent separation from the mother is very unlikely to be healthy. We still have very little idea how modern ways of living help and harm us; widespread Frankensteining of the most important relationship we have at the most important developmental stage of our lives for convenience is really, really stupid.

I understand that it's somewhat tangential, but for some perspective, the number of children born by surrogacy anytime soon will probably be dwarfed by the number of children whose mother died in childbirth or shortly after in the ancestral, "ancient and holy" environment.

  1. You must have a low threshold for what you consider ‘deep, deep evil’. Most people probably don’t realise all the ways in which they’re ‘profaning’ your preferred norms on “Sex, pregnancy, childbirth,  and the relationship between a mother and her child ”. Is almost everyone deeply deeply evil then?

  2. Wrong comparison. I don’t consider surrogacy as an alternative to normal child-bearing, but to normal non-child-bearing. A surrogate child is not pulled from the set of normal comfortable children and thrown into an orphanage, he's pulled from the aether. He's thankful he even has a mouth to eat old bread with.

Do you have scientific evidence for your position? And if the available evidence was against you, what about the ‘ancient and holy ways’? It would be a waste to debate this if it was never your true objection.

Ancient and holy things? What about atheist mothers? That’s not true for them then, so your assertion “it’s true” is false.

Those mothers are wrong. There are paedophiles who honestly think that sex ennobles children, but I will not legalise it for those people on that basis.

I feel like just saying “atheists are wrong, God exists” isn’t much of an argument for anyone who isn’t religious, and I’m failing to find the connection between legalizing child sex and…the existence of atheist mothers?

You suggested that they didn’t believe mothership was sacred, so it’s okay for them to do what they like with it.

I am saying that earnestly thinking something is okay doesn’t make it okay. Buying children from their mother / selling your children does not become moral just because you don’t believe in God.

I am not saying that, I’m saying statements such as “the relationship between a mother and her child is one of the most ancient and holy things that we as humans do” are not by default true, because there are atheist mothers who do not believe in the concept of holiness”. The rest of your argument is not considered in my initial reply; I was focusing on that specific part.

That you reject sanctity and natural law does not make them incoherent.

Neither does asserting your belief in them make them coherent, or persuasive. Leaving aside whatever "natural law" is supposed to be (I gather that for people living in an Anglo common-law system it is one of those terms that sounds inherently authoritative, but to my ears it just seems like a nicer way to say "law of the jungle"), our best understanding of "sanctity" is that it's a qualium that people can experience about anything, if the right neurons are stimulated. Between epileptics having mystical experiences because their sanctity circuits got zapped and various Austronesian tribes assigning sanctity to random words and objects every few years, why would one see it as reflecting anything about the world independent of the reporting subject, or relevant to any subject other than the reporter?

Maybe not, but "sanctity" is not an argument.

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