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Doctor Hammer's avatar

If I were to hazard an argument as to why perfectly acceptable adoptive parents paying the mother directly to adopt a baby is illegal it is to discourage supply of additional babies, that is women having babies just to sell. That itself might not be a problem, but if the goal is to get families to adopt orphans, children who have lost parents or been abandoned, then having a supply of babies of known pedigree available might compete against that. One might fear that women with desirable traits would dominate the market by making a career of selling children while needy orphans would go wanting.

I don't know that that is a good argument, but I suspect it is one of the strongest against letting payments determine things. The assumptions that there is a larger supply of orphans relative to adopting families, as well as a very mobile market in a supply chain sense (families and orphans are evenly distributed, or travel easily) are very important to it.

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Emily's avatar

I think adoption and guardianship relationships just end up being a little island of recalcitrant virtue ethics in the broader sea of consequentialist policy reasoning. People instinctively feel that there's something sacred in entering into a parental relationship with a child (or, to a lesser degree, an animal). It feels more like assuming a vocation or taking on a sacred trust than purchasing a product for pure self-gratification.

Accordingly, virtue-based norms (about permanence, responsibility, care, gravity, self-sacrifice, fidelity to higher ideals) are naturally felt to obtain in these cases, both for the parties directly involved and for those functionaries charged with mediating the relationship. To hint that the shelter volunteers must have been petty tyrants just because they wouldn't just sell you kittens by the pound like so much sliced ham seems... wilfully uncharitable? As a moral situation, it's just not a natural fit for standard utilitarian approaches like quantification, satisficing and contractual reasoning.

Interestingly, I suspect similar sacral instincts kick in around ideas of national guardianship. Not many people would vote for a phenomenally talented presidential candidate who confessed they felt no patriotism and just wanted the office because they enjoyed the state dinners; and most people would strongly disapprove of a President, a general, a parent or a cat owner who decided to casually abandon their role before the normal term, simply because it wasn't that fun anymore. But by your reasoning, it's hard to see the grounds for complaint there: after all, the child, the pet and the country are better off with a few years of competent guardianship than they would be otherwise, so where's the harm?

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