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What? This gay couple compensated a woman for use of her womb, why are you comparing that to child trafficking, which involves a child already born and taken for typically immoral purposes (sex, forced labor, etc.)
Oh, this is a bit old already, but since you expressed genuine confusion, I figured I'd address it. Trafficking is engaging in trade of other humans, and surrogacy fits that definition perfectly.
This sounds like one of Stevenson's Persuasive Definitions i.e changing the meaning of a word without changing its elicited feelings. If this is trafficking, then trafficking is now not inherently immoral, as is typically implied (no one talks about traffickers as ethical people). For you to get to that point, you would have to demonstrate that surrogacy was immoral. Which is your view, I realize, but no one in this thread has put forward a convincing argument for that.
I was under the impression that it always was defined as the trade in human beings. My objection to it is that buying and selling other people is inherently immoral. Asking what's wrong with it is like asking "what's wrong with sexual exploitation?".
No, I don't think that the common usage of the term.
From DHS:
Wikipedia:
and Merriam-Webster:
So no, human trafficking by common usage is not considered to include any and all instance of people buying other people. The key point is the coercion by various means and intention to use the purchased human in forced labor or prostitution.
In my defense, in my language "human trafficking" would literally translate to "human trade".
Anyway, you're really ok with people just purchasing children? If Bill Gates started buying up kids of all ages by the thousands, it would be fine as long as he just wants to become their legal guardian, and not to force them to do anything that's not expected of kids?
I reject the use of "purchase" in both the surrogacy context and this example. It strikes me as the non-central fallacy.
In any case, if Bill Gates were to pay for surrogacy or adopt kids until he had 1000, I would be skeptical that he could provide the kind of fatherly relationship I think many people expect a father to have with his children, adopted or otherwise. More likely, he just pays for their schooling and housing and lets them grow up as if he just had one kid. Does giving 1000 kids a great shot in life negate the probably less-than-ideal fatherly relationship he may have with them? That might be an interesting conversation, but it certainly would not make sense to try and apply the negative connotation of "human trafficking" to such a situation. Not to me anyways.
The "non-central fallacy" was just Scott's way of saying "I can't point to anything wrong with what you're saying, but I don't like how you're using it rhetorically".
To be clear, what I meant would look more like this. After we decide whether that's buying a person, we can move on to what's the difference between that and surrogacy.
Right so I specifically picked a relatively functional billionaire for the example, to evoke the image of him providing decent housing and education to the kids he's buying. It might even feel justifiable from a utilitarian perspective, but to me treating the parent-child relationships like they're stocks on an exchange is already a horror in itself.
The key point Scott was getting at is that your technically correct usage of words isn't debating in good-faith - you're trying to substitute word play for substantive argument. If you were arguing in good faith, you would be spending more time trying to show the meaningful similarity between surrogacy and conventional forms of human trafficking. For example, you might argue that gay couples are all pedophiles, so any instance in which they can pay someone money to become a child's legal guardian is human trafficking. I would reject that claim to be true, but at least it's arguing in good faith about whether we should think of surrogacy (in this case, at least) as human trafficking.
Oh, he's paying parents to part with their children and let him be their legal guardian instead?
We could certainly debate whether or not paying parents to part with their children is always unethical (the archetypal case seems to be a rich person buying a poor person's child, which could be analogized in some way to Souperism in the cases that consent matters), but I don't think it's inherently obvious that all cases of this are unethical, just the typical case. I have no idea how exceptional a parent Bill Gates might be, nor how much he might care for the kids he gets this way.
Regardless, let's suppose that it's immoral for Bill Gates is immoral for doing this. How does this get us to the immorality of surrogacy? I would argue that your example isn't that. You're alluding to parent-child relationships that wouldn't exist in the way we typically describe when we talk about surrogacy. We can talk about how the surrogate can get postpartum depression after birthing a child they can't see as easily as if it were their own, but this is a known issue and it looks like people are already aware and trying to minimize how much it happens.
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That horror is a Modern viewpoint.
Throughout history, among the rich, a head of house would purchase an heir for himself by paying his bride’s father a dowry for his fertile daughter, and trust Fortune or Providence for a son, and hope his wife wouldn’t die in the process, because dowries are expensive. Some societies had polygamy to combat death by pregnancy.
Meanwhile, the poor would be born from cheap marriages, from flings and dalliances, from true love, and from rapes.
Note that I’m not saying any of that was better than marriage for love and a child as a happy accident or a choice, as the result of love!
I am saying that it’s in our genes, and thus in our gene-created brains’ instincts, to treat reproduction as a transaction, because that’s how humanity has survived to the point where anything less than this historical luxury is a horror.
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Technical correctness is the lowest form of being correct. What exactly about the objection "you're equivocating between the common emotionally charged example and the technically valid yet quite different in chargedness one" don't you like?
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A counterpoint: Westerners
trafficpurchase children from far poorer countries all the time, as in Western countries the demand for kids to adopt far exceeds the supply (whereas the opposite is true in the host country).This is done openly and their activities are usually portrayed positively, even though children are generally considered possessions (their involuntary labor is your right as a parent or guardian) in the West for the first 18 years of their life.
What's the difference between this kind of remote adoption, enslaving workers from foreign countries (for labor or prostitution, which is what people usually mean by "trafficking"), and domestic surrogacy? Because I don't think there's a difference at all, and the argument against those things can be made, but is not defensible on strictly utilitarian grounds (because if it was, human history wouldn't contain the amount of slavery that it currently does).
Do you think it is charitable to put emphasis on how you have a right to the child's involuntary labor "in the West" when actual such cases are almost unheard of in the West (aside from making them clean their room) and ubiquitous in the third world?
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In the OP I wrote how I have issues with how adoption works out in practice, and that would be one of them. In theory the difference is that the kids list their parents to some tragedy, and need someone to take care if them. In practice it ends up being an industry because of the supply/demand dynamics you brought up.
There are some bad things specific to surrogacy though. An orphan already lost their parents, surrogacy deliberately puts a child in the situation where they will be abandoned by one of the parents, which otherwise would not have happened.
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