I talked to my boss when I first got hired about being pregnant and doing my job. It was a very physical job with long hours and could be quite dirty, but many women did it pregnant. He agreed with me that pregnancy was no hindurance to the job. For over a year I talked about becoming pregnant and he assured me it was okay. On the day I was supposed to fly out to meet the parents, he informed me that he would let me go if I went. I had my shift covered, everything was in line. I was dumb founded when he said that if I thought he was going to let me work there pregnant I was wrong. All that time he had been fine with it. So I prodded, trying to find out what changed his mind. His wife even did the same job while she was pregnant with their son! His response was "but she didn't sell the baby." He wouldn't let me explain, talk to him, or show him why he was wrong. He just told me to leave. I loved working there until that day and no amount of money could have brought me back after that. Selling my baby?? So far from the truth!
Based leftist boss fighting against human trafficking?? :so-true:
I mean, I gotta admit, like if someone's boss found out they were involved in selling children off to Little St. James and fired them, and I doubt anyone would fault them for it. And based on the thread we had the other day, it seems like a lot of this site believes that surrogacy is "literally buying babies" or equivalent to Murray Rothbard's "free market for infants" - or at least, a bunch of you think that's a reasonable position to have. So I'm curious if any of the 50 or so people who upbeared that thread see any problem with that boss's decision to fire his pregant worker for, as you would agree, "selling her baby." I'm curious to know if you'd make the same decision in his shoes, and if you see any problem with that situation - other than of course, that he couldn't hand her over to the cops as well.
I guess I'm just trying to better understand your positions. Like, is this something that you actually believe, or is it a superficial, exaggerated rhetorical flourish that you know is bullshit but use anyway because it provides a pretext for infringing on women's rights? You know, like "abortion is murder?"
I also wouldn't mind hearing from some centrists and moderates on the issue. Those who think both sides have a point, between, "Surrogate mothers are engaging in human trafficking by returning a child to their biological parent," and, "Surrogate mothers have a right to bodily autonomy." Is there one side that you think is more reasonable, or are you a true centrist, right in the middle of those two, equally extreme positions?
While I'm at it, I'd also like to open up the discussion more broadly. Is there anything else women's bodies do that you think is immoral, or maybe just plain gross? Anything else you think ought to be illegal? I'm really looking to hear from some men here, because I feel like we never get their perspective on that.
Anti-surrogacy is just anti-choice for anti-natalists.
It kinda does though. There's plenty of facts and data that you can point to that leads to the conclusion of workers being exploited. People without a socialist, or even leftist theoretical framework, can still realize that workers are getting a raw deal. I'm not saying that a theoretical framework isn't important, but that theoretical framework should be derived from observations about the world, and routinely tested against observations and refined to better reflect reality.
You already need an idea of what exploitation is, and what moral or social or political weight it has. People in the antebellum American south sometimes genuinely thought the enslaved Africans were benefiting from their labor, not being exploited, same can be said of many industrialists, and even fellow workers, in factories during the jndustrial revolution.
Sometimes thought. Generally, because they were operating with an incorrect theoretical framework which came from propaganda, social pressure, and sometimes material interests, rather than from actual observations of the material world. People didn't see an enslaved person getting whipped and think, "Huh, I wonder whether that's helping or harming him, unfortunately, nobody told me what exploitation is so I guess I'll never know." They saw it, and it troubled them, but then they fell back into the brainworms they had carefully cultivated to make peace with it. It's not a case of lacking a theoretical framework, it's a case of the obvious and readily apparent truth being concealed by a deceptive and false theoretical framework.
In any case, what are you even arguing? That materialism is wrong? That socialism shouldn't be scientific? This isn't up for debate.
What I'm arguing is that you need to already have an idea of what's right and wrong before making any moral judgement. The other person you were speaking with was making the case that exploitation would be bad, and you asked for evidence of exploitation, which missed the mark.
And I disagree with that. When slave traders packed enslaved people onto ships like sardines, knowing that many of them would die on the journey, they did not need some moral philosopher to come over and explain to them that what they were doing was morally wrong. They knew it was wrong, because the wrongness of it would be immediately obvious to any human being.
What policies you support should not be based purely on hypothetical imaginings. That's like chuds on Twitter being like, "Oh no, what if the chatbot needs to defuse a bomb and the password is a racial slur?" If it's not a real situation that actually happens, then it doesn't really matter.
Nobody is arguing against the idea that, if exploitation is happening, that's bad. Obviously, that's a given. If that's all they're saying, then what they're saying is irrelevant to what should be done. "If this policy causes the the earth to explode, that would be a bad policy" is true of every policy but contributes nothing to the discussion.
No. You do need an ideological framework for right and wrong. That's why you saw such debate at the time and into today about whether it was right or wrong.
Anyway, the other person wasn't suggesting a particular policy, nor am I here, just a statement that you can't say it's blanket fine when it works out well for the majority of surrogates. I mean, wage labor has worked out fine for a lot of people, and we really want to change that on this website.
No, that is incorrect. The reason that you saw a debate was because material interests incentivized the creation of false narratives and rationalizations meant to soothe people's consciences while they made shit tons of money. Your position on this is absurd and idealist.
There is no material basis for "hurting people is bad." And saying people "just know" is stupid. They also just know the sun revolves around the earth and the stars are very small and their culture is better than other cultures. None of these things are true.
Hurting others or seeing others get hurt is observably and obviously detrimental to psychological health.
Lemme just ask, where the fuck do you think knowledge comes from? Do you astrally project to the plane of existence where platonic forms float around and bump into things until you learn stuff?
I'm literally just describing how the scientific process works and for some reason you're making me argue it. All of those incorrect ideas you mentioned were corrected because they were tested against material observations and changed to better reflect reality. This is such a ridiculous conversation.
If I got a massive psychological health boost from hurting others, would that make it okay? Are the actions of psychopaths who don't feel remorse always justified because if this? At a certain point you do have to turn inward and ask what is good and why. And that's not science, that's philosophy. I try not to hurt others because I think it's wrong to hurt others, even if doing so would bring me pleasure or any other benefit. This is because I accept as an axiom that hurting others is wrong. With that done, then science can come in to determine what I should do about that, but not before. Science is dependent on you agreeing the world exists and works in regularly established patterns, which isn't true as a given. You have to assume those axioms first. So when the initial point was raised, "if exploitation was going on that would be bad," badgering for proof of exploitation missed the point of that argument.
Again, the question "If there's exploitation going on, would it be bad?" was never something that was remotely in question.
Hey, here's a quick question for you: what's the correct response to, "Assuming trans people actually are molesting children, would that be bad?" Is it, "Yes, that would be bad," or is it, "It doesn't matter because it's not happening, and also fuck you?" Should we allow the conversation about trans rights to be dominated by hypothetical speculation, or should we insist on grounding it in actual facts? Like what other topics do you wanna try your bullshit approach on?