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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.
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.
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