Justice_ What's the Right Thing to Do_ - Michael Sandel [46]
Elizabeth Anderson, a contemporary moral philosopher, has applied a version of this argument to the surrogacy debate. She argues that surrogacy contracts degrade children and women’s labor by treating them as if they were commodities.43 By degradation, she means treating something “in accordance with a lower mode of valuation than is proper to it. We value things not just ‘more’ or ‘less,’ but in qualitatively higher and lower ways. To love or respect someone is to value her in a higher way than one would if one merely used her. … Commercial surrogacy degrades children insofar as it treats them as commodities.”44 It uses them as instruments of profit rather than cherishes them as persons worthy of love and care.
Commercial surrogacy also degrades women, Anderson argues, by treating their bodies as factories and by paying them not to bond with the children they bear. It replaces “the parental norms which usually govern the practice of gestating children with the economic norms which govern ordinary production.” By requiring the surrogate mother “to repress whatever parental love she feels for the child,” Anderson writes, surrogacy contracts “convert women’s labor into a form of alienated labor.”45
In the surrogate contract, [the mother] agrees not to form or to attempt to form a parent-child relationship with her offspring. Her labor is alienated, because she must divert it from the end which the social practices of pregnancy rightly promote—an emotional bond with her child.46
Central to Anderson’s argument is the idea that goods differ in kind; it’s therefore a mistake to value all goods in the same way, as instruments of profit or objects of use. If this idea is right, it explains why there are some things money shouldn’t buy.
It also poses a challenge to utilitarianism. If justice is simply a matter of maximizing the balance of pleasure over pain, we need a single, uniform way of weighing and valuing all goods and the pleasure or pain they give us. Bentham invented the concept of utility for precisely this purpose. But Anderson argues that valuing everything according to utility (or money) degrades those goods and social practices—including children, pregnancy, and parenting—that are properly valued according to higher norms.
But what are those higher norms, and how can we know what modes of valuation are appropriate to what goods and social practices? One approach to this question begins with the idea of freedom. Since human beings are capable of freedom, we shouldn’t be used as if we were mere objects, but should be treated instead with dignity and respect. This approach emphasizes the distinction between persons (worthy of respect) and mere objects or things (open to use) as the fundamental distinction in morality. The greatest defender of this approach is Immanuel Kant, to whom we turn in the next chapter.
Another approach to higher norms begins with the idea that the right way of valuing goods and social practices depends on the purposes and ends those practices serve. Recall that, in opposing surrogacy, Anderson argues that “the social practices of pregnancy rightly promote” a certain end, namely an emotional bond of a mother with her child. A contract that requires the mother not to form such a bond is degrading because it diverts her from this end. It replaces a “norm of parenthood” with a “norm of commercial production.” The notion that we identify the norms appropriate to social practices by trying to grasp the characteristic end, or purpose, of those practices is at the heart of Aristotle’s theory of justice. We will examine his approach in a later chapter.
Until we examine these theories of morality and justice, we can’t really determine what goods and social practices should be governed by markets. But the debate over surrogacy, like the