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I find surrogacy morally absurd, in pretty much the same reaction you do. I have gone back and forth on it with @TracingWoodgrains (respectfully) before, and it is (sadly) one of the best examples of why I can't adopt a 'live and let live' perspective, although I am dispositionally inclined toward that. I think it is a a sister moral issue to abortion, involving the commoditization of children and subordinating the natural family to liquid modernistic relativism.
Where I will push back, is that I don't think it's so much a transhuman issue as another slip of the sexual liberation + LGBT slope and repudiation that gay rights had much more social effect than, people doing their thing in the bedroom. Much like Grindr-> Tinder, this is another social-sexual transformation of norms that really matured in the gay community before being adopted by elite, then PMC straights.
Of course, straight surrogacy has been in the public consciousness for a long time (Phoebe from friends had a plotline around this in the 90s). But it really became trendy in the last decade through wealthy DINKy gay couples using this as an equal access avenue to 'biological children.
You will probably be mocked here and elsewhere for the Lovecraftian horror descriptor, but it fully resonates with me. But let me back it up, and roll back my anti-LGBT perspective here. This is ALL DOWNSTREAM from contraception, socially acceptable divorce and casual sex. I have become less and less patient with people who try to propose some limiting factor to sexual liberation that stops exactly where they want it.
The Catholic view is really the only one that provides a complete and coherent counter framework against this that isn't a bunch of special pleading.
I 100% agree. The choice is between Alphonsus Ligouri and Sam Brinton, and functionally there isn’t a stable middle ground even though everyone wants one- it’s a parabolic slippery slope where if you hit the middle ground you have too much momentum not to launch straight at the other position.
I mean, technically there’s also the position of sheikh al-Wahhab. But the Dar-Al-Islam isn’t exactly compatible with western civilization.
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I don't disagree, like I mentioned in the other comments, I've found myself quite receptive to Catholic moral teachings, it's just that I'm still atheist. So whereas you might say "no sex before marriage, no divorce, no abortions, and no condoms, because that's what God commanded", I would say "no sex before marriage, no divorce, no abortions, and no condoms, because if you allow it, the next thing you know some smartass is going to stick Neuralink up your earhole and turn you into one of Jeff Bezos' automatons".
Well Catholicism has the additional advantage of a sub-philosophy that suggests all these morals expressed within Natural Law, which doesn't necessarily have to be founded on "God".
But you're going to run into the pushback you find in the relativism across your other responses. You're framework is dismissed as an aesthetic complain because the moral relativist, the materialist, and the moral liberalist are married in gnawing at an object morality as arbitrary.
A Natural Law view offers a complete and coherent opposite view (while other conservative or Protestant viewpoints don't imho), but it doesn't and can't address why this not that. I suggest biting the bullet and deriving a religious foundation for your moral intuition or accept being homeless in a neighborhood of transhumanists.
Natural law has nothing to do with christianity. It was invented by greek pagans hundreds of years before christianity began, and only became part of catholic doctrine in the 13th century when Aquinas brought it in, and never got baked into the other branches of christianity like it somehow did with catholicism.
In other words, it doesn't have nothing to do with it.
Which is why I explicitly said that was an advantage of Catholicism over Protestantism, in this sense.
Christianity is fundamentally about God, right? So given that natural law came into one branch of christianity in the way that it did, the fact that there is no compelling indication that God cares about natural law is an argument against that branch of christianity moreso than it is against my point, unless you think Thomas Aquinas is the second coming of jesus or something.
It is an advantage in what sense? Its not like it makes catholicism more likely to be true than protestantism, or the coptic church, greek orthodox church, armenian apostolic church etc.
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I don't mind biting the bullet, but accepting a religious foundation requires faith, and that's something I'm lacking at the moment. Maybe the day will come, but it hasn't yet.
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