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the prospect of men marrying each other and paying money to impregnate someone for a sperm cocktail baby surely predicted the end-times
Renting people's reproductive capacity is abhorrent in the same sense as cannibalism. It's not like renting their labour. So yeah, end-times is on point.
Bryan Caplan occasionally does posts where he makes a big list of things that seemed abhorrent and hideously unnatural over the years, that now we don't think twice about. This seems like that, to me.
The bigger class of concerning things, imo, are things we don't think twice about now that our successors will one day look as monstrous in the same way we're stunned that our ancestors thought slavery was fine.
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141 sats \ 1 reply \ @billytheked 7h
things we don't think twice about now that our successors will one day look as monstrous
Hm. Wrt slavers, I think we can either excuse them because of moral relativism, or not, and say they should have known better.
Do you think we ought not to be excused for our follies on this principle?
Or maybe we should know better about certain things, making our behaviors inexcusable. Then I would wonder what these are as well.
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Or maybe we should know better about certain things, making our behaviors inexcusable. Then I would wonder what these are as well.
The only possible audience for such an audit is yourself; and therefore you're the only one who can say what's on that list.
I do wonder if most people go around, as I do, knowing they're doing terrible things, and do them anyway, because they can, because it's normal and nobody's stopping them, and they get by through a willful act of looking-away.
Or whether the wrongness doesn't even occur to them, and so there's nothing to look away from.
And I don't know which I think is worse.
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20 sats \ 3 replies \ @ek 12h
Renting people's reproductive capacity is abhorrent in the same sense as cannibalism
Why?
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First try to understand why cannibalism is abhorrent, malum in se, and rather than just abnormal.
If you find yourself justifying cannibalism you'll be able to justify buying babies like IKEA furniture.
But the truth is that children from surrogacy tend to feel that their surrogate parent exploited their real mothers. These feelings are gaslit, and in extreme circumstances the surrogate parents cut off the children the way they would never have been cut off by real parents.
Bottom line is that people literally cannot be owned or bought, and if you try to buy a child you're only renting the experience of parenthood, not the real thing, hence those relationships are emotionally easier to sever from both sides.
Renting or buying a person's labour is not exploitation if the person is getting better at something, increasing their own capacity rather than draining it.
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @ek 1h
I still don't understand why you compare something that’s—in my opinion—pretty close to adopting children to people eating each other.
If parents don’t want their child and I adopt it, you think this is as abhorrent as me eating other people?
This is what I'm hearing, and tbh, it sounds quite ridiculous.
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Surrogacy is nothing like adoption if the parent isn't buying the child.
If you bought it isn't a possession. You own it. But that person you bought has free will, they literally cannot be bought, it's technically impossible. The relationship you have with the purchased child is nothing like the adoptive process for a child whose parents haven't had the capacity to raise them. The purchased child will silently or publicly reject the relationship in favour of the parent they lost, but the taboo against speaking out is enormous because the surrogate parents can and do withhold resources.
Purchasing the experience of parenthood is a scummy way to exploit people in poverty.
Notice that in adoption the adoptive parents are told to tell them that they have been adopted from an early age, and to explain the situation, and to enable bridges to their real parents if feasible. It wasn't like that in the past, but we learned. That's not the case with surrogates.
Listen to the video by Olivia Maurel.
Cannibalism is using a person as an object, consuming them. Modern surrogacy is a consumptive act, like buying furniture from IKEA.
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