Repugnant transactions and, well, whose repugnance?
What was striking was that it also split along another fissure: Collins’s possible motives. It was OK, some felt, to use a surrogate if you have infertility problems. But not in order to keep your figure, help your career, or because pregnancy is taxing and you are rich enough to outsource it.
People were also divided on the motives of the surrogate. All well and good if she was driven by a desire to help Collins and her husband. But not if the true reason was the need for money.
This is one of those repugnant markets that Al Roth made his career studying - to the point of his Nobel.
There is a defensible version of surrogacy, involving commissioning parents who are genuinely in need and a “gestational carrier” who was not pressured by her circumstances. But there are many, many indefensible versions, and no sure way to guard against all of them. If some reasons for surrogacy are morally unacceptable, then so is the practice itself.
People should not be allowed to do that because it is repugnant.
It’s not difficult to see this attitude in the society around us. The public health crusade against booze is, largely enough, driven by the temperance movement. People should not drink because people should not be allowed to drink - they’re certainly resistant enough to any of the evidence about minimum pricing for that to be the likely motivation. People should not vape because that’s a replacement for the demon smoking - that’s just bad, see? Payment to kidney, or liver (yes, this is possible) donors should not be allowed because that’s repugnant, see? Despite Iran, the only place with paid kidney donation also being - and this is not a coincidence - the only place without queues of people slowly dying on dialysis. Better that people die than moral purity be violated.
But all of these come up against a significant logical barrier. Whose repugnance?
The liberal insistence is that we can only constrain the actions of others where there is a significant third party harm. Preventing that third party harm overrides that presumption of liberty. That I think, or we think, that something is immoral is no reason to stop - in the absence of that third party harm - others, who do not share our repugnance, from doing it.
No, this is important. To switch examples there are those who insist that capitalism is a very bad thing. There are those, like us, who insist that imposed socialism is a very bad thing. But we who oppose aren’t parading outside John Lewis insisting that a worker owned cooperative - and thus a socialist organisation - must be closed down. It’s the imposition we oppose, not the act. The breach of liberty that is, in this case the liberty to engage in capitalist acts like being paid labour if that’s what is desired.
That some people find paid surrogacy a repugnant transaction is true. The correct response is that those people should not engage in a transaction they find repugnant. As to everyone else that’s up to their moral intuition.
Tim Worstall