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That has not been my experience of my conversations with you. The multiple very long debates do very little to clarify what you actually believe. Yes, I can make guesses based on what kind questions you ask, of who, and when, but this tactic ensures that an absolute minimum of your actual beliefs are exposed, so you never have to defend them. That's why I found it too much to suddenly demand I present my entire moral framework, syllogisms and all, though I suppose I may have misunderstood what you meant because:
If this is what you consider laying out your moral framework, then I'm more than happy to continue.
I disagree. Birth is a biological process. Normally a mother is a woman that both gave the egg that later became the baby, and also gave birth. In this case we have only one of the two, so at most you can say a surrogate is only half a mother, but she's definitely still a biological mother. I'd actually attribute more of motherhood to her, because the process of carrying a pregnancy and giving birth is far more intimate and bonding to the baby, than the process of extracting an ovary.
Coming back to the "renting out" of a uterus being morally insane, I don't think what's happening in the process can even be accurately described this way. We are embodied beings, and we cannot be separated from our bodies. Renting out a uterus is effectively renting out the entire person, and renting people is objectifying them. From a moral standpoint I don't see how it can be seen as any different than slavery. Like I said before, slavery is not considered immoral because any abuse that happens to the slave, because even in cases where there is no abuse, slavery is considered illegal, and morally abhorrent.
One way I could imagine there being such a thing as "renting out a uterus", is if you could temporarily extract it, grow the baby there, and then put it back in the donor, with no harm to their health. It still sounds pretty horrifying to me, but at least it's not buying babies from the mother.
Adoption operates under a completely different framework. It's not a free transfer of title to the child's custody, it's the process of finding the best caretaker for the child, after it either lost it's parents, or they have been found so incompetent that the child would be better off with someone else (including the cases where the child is voluntarily given up, because any parent who wants to give up the child is assumed to not provide good care, if they were forced to). There is no open market for children, where they can be bought willy-nilly to the highest bidder... or at least there isn't supposed to be. Adoption is practice is far darker than in it is on paper, and in these cases I'm not sure if it's actually any better than surrogacy.
So? There are immoral ways of creating a child. Lots of children would not exist but for rape, for example.
My argument does not rely completely on the child having a say, it starts from the assumption that a child has a right to a mother and father. Sometimes life throws curveballs at people, and either child loses the parents, or it turns out being in contact with them would be worse than being separated, so we then make the best out of a bad situation, but deliberately creating that seperation, in advance, when there is no good reason to, is doing purposeful harm to the child.
The "no say" argument was an attempt to "pre-bunk" the liberal, "consent is the only moral criterion that matters" argument. Yes, it's true that the liberal framework is incoherent, but that's no skin off my nose.
But we rent out our entire bodies all the time don't we? When I go to work my whole body is at work, when a coal miner risks his life and health it's not generally considered slavery (as long as he is getting paid and voluntarily took the job of course). The difference isn't the objectification it's that a surrogate is freely choosing to be a surrogate. If they are being forced into it in some Handmaids Tale scenario then I would also agree that is slavery. But that doesn't appear to be the case for most surrogates. So it's very different to slavery.
Is being a soldier or a firefighter being a slave? A bodybuilder where your body is the main thing being put on the line? Prostitution in general? Being a hand model? I kind of agree it could be considered objectifying in that many of these jobs are very reliant on what your body can do/looks like. But I don't really see that as a problem. As you point out we are embodied. Any job that requires the use of your physical body (i.e. most of them) is commodifying our bodies in return for money.
True! But it still creates a child who is (in most belief systems I think) considered to be innocent of the immoral act that created them. The question isn't whether how they were created is immoral it's whether them being created is better than not when weighed against the costs inflicted. If voluntary surrogacy is (for example) mildly immoral but adding a human who can experience great joy in their lives is very moral, then you're still coming out ahead.
Ahh maybe I see the issue. I don't think that makes sense. Rights only make sense if they can be enforced and babies don't stop being born to a widowed bride or as a result of a one night stand where the father is never seen again. Should we abort babies who are about to be born where the father has died? What is the corrective factor that can be done? You can't conjure their father from the dead or wherever.
So I think it must be true that babies do not in fact have a right to have a mother and father (unless you just mean from a biological perspective, but that would also be fulfilled by surrogacy in any case).
No I don't think so. I think there's a massive qualitative difference between paying someone to do some work, and paying someone to rent out their body. I'm also pretty sure you agree, ans don't believe what you just said, and there's an easy way to prove me wrong:go and tell your wife that you think she should work as a prostitute.
Also, if all work is renting out your body, then why are is slavery illegal?
Yeah, but I'm not advocating for the murder of children born of surrogacy, so this seems neither here nor there.
I don't think so. This would imply drugging and raping someone, or raping people in a comma, is perfectly fine,or only mildly immoral.
Not really. If a murderer is never apprehended, no one says "well, I guess the victim didn't have a right to live". If you want to use it descriptively, "rights" just means people will act to provide / prevent something, not that they will always be successful. But usually it's used normatively.
I'm pretty sure you also know that, and thay you yourself believe in rights that we should protect. For example, you don't think slavery is morally justifiable, but you have skipped the comparisons to it, in order to minimize the exposure of your own principles, like I described earlier.
Do yoi think that people who believe in property rights, believe victims of robbery should be killed?
Because slaves don't agree to rent out their bodies? That's kind of fundamental to the idea of slavery. It's ok to pay a worker to pick your cotton, but not to enslave them (though see below!) We do call people wage slaves, but we don't mean they are actual slaves.
You're conflating that all work is renting out your body with all renting out your body being the same. Renting my house to my brother and renting my house at gunpoint to a soldier are very different things. Renting out your body voluntarily is different than being a slave (which is not voluntary). I also don't want my wife to be a coalminer or a soldier for example. That all work is renting out your body does not mean that all work is the same.
If you're going to rape someone raping them when they don't know about it is probably more moral than otherwise sure. But some costs are still inflicted, a drugged woman will wake up and realize what happened, the woman in the coma will face significant health complications and so on and so forth.
But as rape and surrogacy are not the same the treatment does not need to be the same in any case. (Unless the woman is held captive and forcibly inseminated, which I don't think is a central example here). The costs inflicted are taken on by her voluntarily.
Yes! You don't have a right to live, nobody does! I think almost all of what people call rights are incoherent. You might want to live and struggle to live if someone is trying to kill you, but there is no being handing out rights such that it means anything more than "I don't want to die". Which is a perfectly reasonable position, I don't want to die either! But it isn't a right. A wolf doesn't have a right to live, it can fight to stay alive one more day, or it might get shot with no ability to do anything about it.
Having said that we can certainly redirect to what people want to enforce or provide, I understand lots of people do not agree with my idea about rights in any case. As an aside, I think slavery is usually not justifiable but there are times I think it would be. Indeed so too could rape or murder. If the human race was facing extinction and you had to enslave half the race to save the remains I think that's morally justifiable. Likewise if you had to force women to have children to save the human race I think that too would be justifiable.
But again those are not the situations we are faced with in our lives here today. A surrogate isn't a slave because she agrees to being a surrogate, a farm worker is not a slave because he agrees to accept money in exchange for back breaking labour.
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