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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   33506 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025

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I appreciate you extending charity and noticing that my worldview is, to the best of my understanding, consistent, even if it's unusual.

Going out on a hypothetical limb, what if you could saw off your own leg and donate that to another person, who was for some reason one-legged? Would you make the argument that the mendicant who did so would be in no way being exploited, that hey we all work for the man one way or another, this is just a logical and acceptable extension of that? It's a weak analogy and to my knowledge this isn't quite possible, but a similar (again, not exact) principle applies.

I think paid organ donations should be legal, though a leg would be a difficult one to pull off.

So yes, I think it should be legal, and if the donor had capacity to make decisions, and was being compensated at a rate he was happy with, I see no other reason to disagree.

If they wanted my leg, I wouldn't say there isn't a sum that wouldn't buy it, but it has a lot of zeroes in it. Someone elsewhere would probably do it for much cheaper. And there are people who'd pay for the privilege, either as a fetish or because of a weird disease that convinces them that their legs shouldn't be attached to them.

Do you think this law is equally stupid? If so, why?

I've elaborated elsewhere in the comment chain, but the gist of it is that I consider it a transaction at the end of the day, it might be an expensive one, but I consider most things fungible, and I think there are easily sums of money that leave the adoptive parents and the surrogates happy about the arrangement.

There's something metaphysical (in the most literal sense of that word) about motherhood, much that we do not understand about maternal bonding to children (or paternal bonding, for that matter). I am not sure that we are yet at the point where we are as a species ready for gestational surrogacy, or if that point will ever come.

I mean, you do see that I disagree on the metaphysics here, and I haven't heard of most surrogacy arrangements ending badly, not that I know any personally. Definitionally, the ones in the news are either because they're celebs, or because something went wrong. I think that's not true for the majority.

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