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Notes -
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.
I'm a bit skeptical given how self-congratulatory the Moderns are, and how they love to misportray their predecessors - let's say that it is. I'm going to go with a "so what?" on that one.
Wasn't it the daughter's father paying a dowry?
Ok, well, let's shut down all the Holocaust museums around the world, because genocide is in our genes, and our horror in reaction to it comes from our current historical luxury.
You're right, the dowry is paid by the bride’s family to the groom as the bride’s part of her and her siblings’ inheritance. I was thinking of bride-price:
As for the horror of considering the economic value of people when making family and reproductive decisions, I too prefer the luxury or privilege of the present age to the “state of nature” which preceded it. As I prefer living in a society where people are not legally enslaved or hunted for their tribal ancestry.
However, infertility and inconvenience are both considered problems which surrogacy can resolve; my disgust with surrogacy is not in the payment for services rendered (which I as a libertarian applaud) but in the implied infidelity (which I as a Christian oppose).
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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?
If nothing else, then the fact that the way something is emotionally charged is mostly a question of propaganda, not of how true and accurate something is. But aside from that the question that was raised in his blog post (is taxation theft?) is deep and valid, with equally deep and valid answers. You can go with a straight up "No. It's a binding relationship between the rulers and the ruled, that comes with rights and duties on both sides." or with "Yes, but it's necessary for a civilized society" or whatever. He picked the laziest way to address it.
And are you trying to show that surrogacy is purchasing a human being for the sake of truth and accuracy, or for propaganda?
Neither. I'm discussing my values, and comparing it to others'. You cannot do that for the sake of truth and accuracy because core values are self-justifying, and there's no way you can say one is true.This is in contrast to what Scott was doing. Branding something as a fallacy lays claim to a truth value. I'm not really propagandizing either, I'd hit a lot harder if that's what I was trying to do.
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