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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023

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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".

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.

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.

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.