Taboo Trades
Taboo Trades
Decommodification As Exploitation with Vida Panitch
Vida Panitch and I discuss (de)commodification, corruption, exploitation, and coercion with my co-host, UVA Law 3L, Nevah Jones. We're specifically interested in women's intimate and reproductive labor, including sex work, surrogacy, and egg donation.
Vida Panitch is an Associate Professor of Philosophy and Ethics and Public Affairs at Carleton University. Her primary research project addresses the moral boundaries of markets – specifically markets in public goods, including health care and education, and physical goods, including body parts and intimate services – and the extent to which theories of exploitation, commodification, and inequality can help us determine their permissible regulation.
Recommended Reading:
1. Panitch, Vida. Decommodification as Exploitation (draft)
2. Panitch, Vida. Liberalism, commodification, and justice, in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics (2020)
3. Panitch, Vida. Basic Income and Intimate Labor, The Future of Work, Technology, and Basic Income, Michael Cholbi and Michael Weber eds. (New York: Routledge): 157-174.
I think philosophers should be forced to go before a panel of lawyers often because this is really, really helpful.
SPEAKER_02:Hey, hey, everybody. Welcome to the Taboo Trades podcast, a show about stuff we aren't supposed to sell, but do anyway. I'm your host, Kim Kravick. My guest today is Vida Panich, an associate professor of philosophy and ethics and public affairs at Carleton University. Her primary research project addresses the moral boundaries of markets, specifically markets and public goods, including health care and education and physical goods, including body parts and intimate services, and the extent to which theories of exploitation, commodification and inequality can help us determine their permissible regulation. I'm very excited to talk with her today about her work, which I think is a must read for anyone interested in taboo or contested markets and related issues of corruption, coercion and exploitation. Thank you for having me. Thank you for coming. Thank you for doing this. Hi,
SPEAKER_11:Rita. I'm Nevaah Jones. I am a 3L here at UVA Law, and thank you for being with us today.
SPEAKER_07:Terrific. Thank you so much for having me.
SPEAKER_02:So we are today going to be discussing at least two articles. Others might arise. The draft article, Decommodification as Exploitation, which we loved. Theda, thank you for sending it to us. Do you know yet where that's going to be
SPEAKER_07:published? Yeah, it's coming out in a volume that's being edited by Matt Zwolinski and Ben Ferguson. Matt's kind of the new voice of exploitation, the new go-to voice of exploitation theory. He was handed the mantle.
UNKNOWN:Yeah.
SPEAKER_07:after Wertheimer took a step back. And so it's going to be a well-received volume. I think it's coming out with Oxford and hopefully within the year. And I think the working title is Exploitation, Politics, Philosophy, Economics.
SPEAKER_02:Okay, wonderful. So I look forward to that. The other article that we're definitely going to discuss is Liberalism, Commodification, and Justice, a 2020 article in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics. And again, if others come up then, you know, or seem appropriate to our discussion, feel free to mention them. I'm going to start with the decommodification article And to oversimplify, and I'm going to give you a chance just to elaborate on the themes in case I get it wrong. But sort of our takeaway from this is you argue that the failure to remunerate suppliers of bodily goods and intimate services is both unfair and disrespectful. You also discuss social expectations of gendered altruism and the role of deception. And we're going to touch on all of those things. Do you want to just briefly explain to listeners why it is the failure to pay that's unfair and disrespectful rather than payment, as many critics have claimed?
SPEAKER_07:So what motivated the paper was finding that conceptions of commodification and conceptions of exploitation had become blurred. And as somebody, as a philosopher who's big on taxonomy, I like to keep my concepts as unblurred as possible. So I didn't really set out to have at commodification theorists in this paper so much as to say, look, when you're appealing to exploitation claims, it's not nearly as straightforward as you think by way of making a decommodification argument. That is, this concept is doesn't readily avail itself to you in the ways that you seem to think it does. It's a concept that is rich in its own right and doesn't just exist in the service of making another case why we should not assign price values to the body. So I was like, look, if you actually probe what exploitation theory has to say about various kinds of transactions, it looks almost too obvious that the anti-commodification theorists have got it backwards. Like it's not a hard case to make. The case that like zero payment is like an offense in a transaction where profits are being made pretty much on any account of exploitation. is certainly a violation. The dignity point was going to be a little trickier to make, but I had been wanting to say something about the patriarchal expectation of gendered altruism for a while in a paper, and I thought, well, you know, it's pretty undignified to be subjected to the patriarchal expectation of gendered altruism, and so if what we're worried about on that account of exploitation, it's dignity, then it bears saying that subjecting somebody to this expectation seems quite undignified. So yeah, so really my motivation was just to say, hey, anti-commodification theorists, you do your thing. I have other stuff to say about your thing. Go ahead and do your thing, but don't think that you can appeal to exploitation claims that readily in the service of your thing, because they actually speak against what you're trying to accomplish. And that That was both the motivation and more or less the substance of the argument.
SPEAKER_02:Great. Thank you. That is a very helpful starting point. So there was a lot of interest from the students here in the role of deception. In brief, your argument is that deception is more likely to be present when we force providers to behave altruistically. Do you want to modify that or have I got it correct?
SPEAKER_07:Nope. It provides fertile ground for the exploitation of providers.
SPEAKER_02:Okay, great. And so I'm going to turn it over to Neva. Yes. So I
SPEAKER_11:have two questions here about deception and I'll kind of lob them one at a time here. When you give examples in your article about some of the deceptive practices, specifically around commercial surrogacy and egg donation that you note increase the profit margins of the actors in the market at the expense of the suppliers. But some of the examples that you gave just struck me as transactions where there's some asymmetry to the information available to the parties. So I was wondering if you could elaborate on what makes those transactions, again, commercial surrogacy and donation, different from a transaction such as a pawnbroker who lowballs a seller knowing that they can get a much higher price on a subsequent sale where Those two individuals don't have the same information at hand. Or an employer who says to an employee, no, we can't give you a raise this year. But you should hang around anyway because you're like family to us. We value you so much. And there might be a disagreement or a misunderstanding about the context or the nature of the
SPEAKER_07:context. So I think the second example is sort of more relevant to the cases I'm interested in than the first. I don't think it's necessarily an asymmetry of information. So I was careful. There's two ways that you can kind of mess with consent. And one is to misinform. And the other is to coerce, right? To threaten in some way. And I know you guys have questions about that. So we'll definitely unpack it. But the kind of like relationship or transaction I'm talking about isn't so much one of misinformation, because as some of you pointed out in your questions, like misinformation can be corrected. That information is out there. It's available. So there's something else going on. And I think it's a... a different conception of the norms appropriate to the exchange. And the participants to the exchange might know that there are different norms appropriate or different values associated with the goods that are being exchanged. But it's the kind of attitude with which they come to the exchange, the norm or the value that is like predominant in their mind when they come to the exchange or the norm or the value that they are being encouraged to come to the exchange with. So even if they have information like, you know, I know somebody is making money off this and I'm not, but you know, that's okay because I actually think this is the kind of role that women are supposed to play in a non self-interested way, in a way where they're not profit seeking. And so it's a nice thing to do and I wanna be a nice person, right? And so I don't think that information is being withheld. I think there are just norms of kind of social behavior governing relationships to do with the body and specifically women's bodies. And those norms are kind of inculcated in society, right? Patriarchy pre-exists these transactions. So the trouble is that the participants are coming to these transactions against the backdrop of these norms that prescribe altruism specifically for women. So nobody even has to lie to them, really. They've already been sort of inculcated with a set of norms that their, you know, co-transactors have not been.
SPEAKER_02:So Vida, how would that play out as a practical matter? And maybe it's lots of different ways. I mean, one might be that women just don't advocate for themselves because they have internalized these norms. I guess the other one is that they might attempt to, but are labeled as undesirable providers for being sort of troublemakers or overly greedy. And I mean, I have to say, I think the sociological and anthropological research on reproductive providers does does provide support for that second, probably for both notions, but certainly for the second one. Do you have any thoughts on sort of how this plays out at all?
SPEAKER_07:So in terms of what to be done about it or about
SPEAKER_02:how? No, it's like sort of what are the practical implications of these gendered norms of altruism that you're discussing within the setting of body provider? So I
SPEAKER_07:think whenever anybody appeals to like a patriarchy as an explanation for something right then the there is sort of a burden of proof to sort of be like well how does it function and how does that work. And, you know, I'm as hard pressed as most feminists to actually explain the causal pathways of like a system of of oppressive norms. We can talk about sexism. We can use Kate Mann's theory and talk about sexism as the ideological justification and misogyny as the police wing of the patriarchy. There's all kinds of ways in which this expectation of altruism is attached to the gender norms that are taught to boys and girls and that are right expected of men and women right in the in the ways that they live their lives and so it's hard to kind of identify like oh it was their parents or oh it was their education or oh it's television or oh you know it's it's it's the way that an oppressive kind of system of norms operates that gets people to a point in their lives where they're like I'm going to do this nice thing for a stranger and not expect any money for it and huh it's always women who seem to be right. Like even when it comes to plasma donation and organ donation, um, it's 70% women. And like, you know, you guys are law scholars. Somebody should check my numbers before anybody quotes me on that. Um, I think that's correct when it comes to kidney donation, plasma, somebody should look it up. Um, but it's a two thirds of donors of, you know, of non, um, non family donors. Um, nope. Two thirds of donors in general are women. So something is, is, uh, is prompting more altruistic behavior on the part of women than men. And there's all kinds of institutional, like, explanations we can point to. So I guess my worry is that the fertility industry and some of these other kind of body industries are not just... tapping into that and taking advantage of that, but actually reaffirming it through the arguments that they give and the just rationalizations and the justifications they offer, they become part of the problem.
SPEAKER_02:Right. So on plasma, as you know, in the U.S., plasma donors are not donors. It is disproportionately male, which is perhaps to be expected for a variety of reasons. There has been quite a bit of writing on, without really nailing down what the reasons are. In this class,
SPEAKER_07:we always
SPEAKER_02:put- Right. But we still refer to them as donors. where this has been playing out. Some of the ones that came to mind were models and actresses. And of course, men are in those fields as well. But we mostly hear stories from women about sort of being blackballed or disadvantaged in the business because of being labeled difficult. Again, anecdotal. I think that it was Courtney, I'm not positive who brought it up. Okay, so it was Courtney who brought up brides negotiating the various contracts for the wedding where they always overcharge you. And you don't want to be labeled sort of a difficult person who cares about the cost of your wedding, I guess. I mean, I would be that person for sure. So these were a couple of examples that folks brought up. And Vita, if you have further thoughts on that, or if Courtney or Neva, either of you want to follow up on that, please feel free.
SPEAKER_07:I mean, I certainly think that the expectation of gendered altruism is going to play out in all sorts of domains. And so, you know, is it unique to body markets? Certainly not. Is it more likely to perpetuate exploitation in body markets? Possibly. Right. So those are some interesting examples you gave and ones that I'm going to think more about, because these are domains where women are being I mean, let's face it, like in how many domains are women not systematically being underpaid? Right. Relative. So, you know, and this is just another case where these sorts of arguments get raised and then we take a step back and we're like, oh, why are we drawing these boundaries around the body? If these sorts of things are playing out in all sorts of transactions, why have we drawn a line around the body and am I participating in the drawing of a line that is really factually invisible but somehow morally bothersome? Yeah, so I think those are good examples to raise in terms of pressing that point. What is it that's unique about the body? And if we continue, as I have obviously in this paper, to treat that line as though it's significant, factually and normatively, what other kinds of problems am I playing into by treating that line as significant?
SPEAKER_02:Well, I will point out one thing that I think supports your argument is that there was a time when we used to openly argue that women should get paid less in particular jobs because they weren't likely to be the breadwinners for the family. And we don't do that. So this is a setting that is different in the sense that we are telling women specifically and openly that they should be providing what is a valuable labor or product for free. And that's not the case in these others. It's just a question of whether, I don't know, Cameron Diaz gets paid, I don't know how much they get paid,$10 million versus four or something.
SPEAKER_07:Yeah. And I think like the line around the body if I want to reconceptualize it, isn't so much a line around the body. It's a line around the gender norm that attaches to a certain type of body. So reproduction, sexual intimacy, domestic care work, child-related care work, all of these things are things that normally don't have a price tag because they are done by women privately in the home. And it's really... you know, sex work aside, like these are things that we've only begun paying women for outside of the home recently. And I think there's just a kind of leftover kind of hangover conception that, well, these are things that women do because they're nurturing themselves. being nurturing as part of the role that they're ascribed. And so it's wrong to ask. You wouldn't ask for money for this at home. So you shouldn't ask for money for this not at home. To which one counter is, well, they should be asking for money for this at home. So the line is not explicitly around the body so much as it is around the kind of work that people with certain kinds of bodies are expected to do or have been expected to do in the private sphere for forever.
UNKNOWN:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Right. Neva, I don't know, you had another question after this or no, I can't remember.
SPEAKER_11:My second question had to do with whether or not there were responsibilities for individuals who chose to participate in markets that have potential for deceptive practices. But I think, Vita, what I heard you say was that even though there's information available, an individual may overlook it or disregard it just based on their own ingrained knowledge. expectation of gender altruism with their ingrained gender norms. So it's not necessarily that they can't find this information, it's that they have other forces acting on them to maybe disregard this information or not seek
SPEAKER_07:it out. And that seeking out this information and then acting on it would exactly like make somebody a difficult person to work with. And agencies are specifically looking for women who are not difficult people to work with, right? So it may actually get you into hot water in terms of pursuing a role that you'd like to pursue if you press too hard in non-altruistic ways because you've done your homework.
SPEAKER_02:Thank you. So I'm going to go next to Talia.
SPEAKER_11:Hi, I'm Talia Sandbury. I'm a 3L. Thanks again for being here today. I have a question. It goes more along the lines of deception, which was mentioned a little bit earlier. In the article, you mentioned that surrogacy clinics mislead surrogates into thinking that their transaction is a gift exchange. for those altruistic reasons that you mentioned in order to reduce their bargaining power. And so while this might be an explanation for, you know, surrogacy or egg donation, it doesn't seem like it works for sex work, even though in that industry, there's also unequal bargaining power. So my question is, is there deception involved in the sex work industry? And if so, what kind?
SPEAKER_07:Yeah. So that opens up a whole host of super interesting questions. And the first thing that came to my mind is, huh, I wonder how badly sex workers are being underpaid. Like, you know, obviously there are different, there's different kinds of sex work and different kinds of sex workers, and some are very well paid and some are very poorly paid. And so that's a kind of distinction that bears out in surrogacy arrangements if we think about like California surrogates as compared to like Thai or Mexican or Indian surrogates in terms of the discrepancy between what they're earning. But the deception question was interesting. I mean, I wonder, you're right to the extent that both parties to the sex work exchange understand fully what type of exchange it is. And that may be a point in its favor that both parties are actually coming to it from the same normative perspective, which is this is a negotiation. This is a financial negotiation. This is a fee for service situation. And so Certainly some sex workers have way more bargaining power than others for a whole host of reasons. But we recognize that the more bargaining power they have, the more they're going to get out of this negotiation, et cetera. Whereas I think the problem with surrogacy is that they're not coming to the arrangement, understanding that the more bargaining power they have, the better, and that this is a financial negotiation and they need to represent their own interests in that way. So maybe sex work, You're right. I didn't end up using an example under the deception section because maybe it doesn't belong as one of those examples because there's so much less deception operating there precisely because everybody knows that it's a financial exchange. And in the non-financial... Okay, so here's an example. Somebody marries like a sugar daddy. Somebody marries like a rich man and does it for the money, but everybody walks around like, we're so in love, so great how we met. And that's the story that they tell but both parties kind of know that that's not quite right, that they have to tell this like love story. So I would say there's like more deception going on in the sort of non-financial version of what is still clearly like a sex-based exchange. So it might be an example where the less deception, the better from the point of view of both parties like negotiating a contract that is clearly like a financial one.
SPEAKER_02:I mean, that seems right. Vida, think of how much deception there often is in the unpaid version of casual sex hookups, right? I mean, everything from I'm rich and important to I love you to this isn't a one night stand to I'm not married to, I mean, like, it's just sort of, in some ways, this seemed to be a point in your favor. It is interesting, sort of your answer highlighted how differently we think about sex work as a financial transaction, even when it remains illegal. We don't with, say, surrogacy or egg donation, but sex work has been around longer. Maybe that's part of the answer, at least.
SPEAKER_07:Yeah. Yeah. And I don't know. I mean, again, I'm coming from the Canadian context where on some very broad sense of decriminalization, like sex work has been decriminalized, but it's still incredibly taboo. Whereas like you know, gamete donation and surrogacy, like, Ooh, there are things that Canadians are like really proud of because they think there's no, you know, there's no like financial exchange involved, but there's some very great water there. But, um, you know, it's sort of like culturally celebrated because it's a non-financial exchange surrogacy and it's like culturally like frowned upon because it is a financial exchange of sex work. Um, but we've nonetheless made the move to decriminalize it for like all the obvious reasons of like safety. And, um, so yeah, Yeah, I think socially, at least, we've recognized the distinction here. And in having decriminalized sex work, we're like, yes, this is a financial exchange. We don't like it. We don't want it to exist. But in so far as it exists, this is what defines it, right? Which is that it is a financial transaction. And there's some definite recognition of that.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Okay. So I'm going to turn it over to Tom. Yeah. So part of my question kind of relates to the points that Kim raised. And to the extent this is problematic, do we think efforts should sort of center around a broader effort to alter social norms? Or in the medical context, rather, should we expect actors like hospitals, medical practitioners, perhaps to bear some of the financial burden of altruistic transactions? Because it seems in a way we're trying to compensate without relating that compensation to the good itself. And, you know, I'm just wondering, to what extent should we discard this? Should we try to work within that framework?
SPEAKER_07:So my answer, I guess, is sort of twofold. One is that I think the burden actually falls on regulatory factors. institutions, not on individual hospitals, not on individual doctors. I think commercial surrogacy agencies, there's not enough oversight. They're not being properly regulated. So I would say that the answer is that, yeah, regulations should be imposed that say, you know, X number of dollars should be offered in each transaction. You know, this is how much an organ should cost. Nobody should be allowed to pay more for that, you know, than this. I think if people can't afford to pay that fee, that that fee should come in the form of a voucher from the state. So I think that there just needs to be a lot of room for state intervention in these markets rather than having it be left up to individual hospitals or individual agencies to self-regulate, because I don't think they're very good at that. And we're going to see a lot of kind of like arbitrary differences in terms of how these exchanges are played out unless there's better regulatory. system in place. Now, that being said, I do think some of these bodily goods and services are more important than others. So like going back to my other paper and talking about like necessary goods, I'm inclined to think of kidneys as necessary goods. I'm really not inclined to think of babies that way. So the extent to which like, I still think government intervention of all of these industries is necessary in the sense of saying like, hey, agencies, you're not allowed to overcharge your clients. for this and you're not allowed to like you know price cap with with respect to egg donors and so regulation is appropriate across these industries but in terms of whether the state gets involved in like helping people acquire organs helping people compensate organ donors if they can't afford to um i think those kinds of moves would be appropriate only when we're talking about necessary goods like life-saving goods and i don't think having like a baby that's like genetically related to you in some way is like a necessary life-saving good i do think a kidney is. So that's going to change the type of regulation and intervention, I think. But in terms of individual actors taking moral responsibility, I mean, that's always great, but I don't think that's the solution to the problem that I would advocate.
SPEAKER_02:So I'm going to cabin this question of how we define necessary goods because there are some questions about that later and I don't want to jump ahead. I'll just point, I tend to agree with you, but I will just point out that this is a controversial position that genetic offspring are not in fact the necessary good. And we have just to promote a prior episode, Kim Mutcherson was on earlier and she very much takes that position. But I'm going to just sort of, I just wanted to mention that while I remember it, but cabinet, because we've got a number of questions about how we define necessary goods coming up. I'm going to return to Talia, who has another question, sort of returning to some of the themes about women's work.
SPEAKER_11:Yes, for sure. Thank you. So my question is, you sort of hinted at it just now about regulation. So it seems like justice and commodification of women's bodies mainly raises questions of coercion due to financial factors, either not being paid or not being paid enough. Is our approach to thinking about finances in these markets a little too specific? Instead, should we be advocating not necessarily for payment of sex work or organ donation or things like that or domestic work, but more so a basic living wage for everyone so that people that do engage in this work, we know it's because they desire to do it and not because they have to do it to feed their families. And it seems like that type of system of compensation would also help women in many lines of work, including domestic work and childcare, but also people who are underpaid for other reasons, like minority men or people with different immigrant statuses.
SPEAKER_07:Good. So that's a great question. And I thank you for it because this is both an opportunity to plug a different paper, as Kim recommended that I do, if it seemed appropriate. But the paper is called Basic Income and Intimate Labor. And it's in a book called The Future of Work, Technology, and Basic Income that came out in 2019. And in it, I try to argue that the criminalize, don't criminalize debate about sex work and surrogacy, paid surrogacy, has been spinning its wheels for years. It's been the same fight over and over and over, and everybody eventually acknowledges, even advocates of criminalization eventually acknowledge that ultimately it's dangerous and problematic for a whole host of reasons, and all it really does is turn a white market into a black market. It doesn't eradicate the market. et cetera. So I tried to change the debate a little bit and say, what if we started talking instead about the kinds of things that might make it less likely that women would go into these industries if that's the thing that we're actually worried about? And so I looked at some research that says there's not a lot of, I mean, there's not a lot of good information about what a consistent cash stream would do for people in general, but also in these particular industries. But I did find some research that suggested that women who identify as sex workers, who identify as full-time sex workers, it takes them five years of doing the work to self-identify that way And so most people who get into sex work, get into it in, you know, a kind of piecemeal fashion where it's like, I can't pay the electricity bill this month. Like I can't pay rent. I can't pay school fees. I'm just going to do this once. My friend's going to hook me up. I'm just going to do this once. I'm just going to do this twice. And it five years of their lives are spent in this kind of piecemeal. I'm not, I'm not a sex worker, but you know, I need some extra cash. And then eventually they're doing it full time. And that's when they begin to self-identify. So this obviously is not like, the only narrative but it is it is a it is a common one in terms of um women in the industry and so one way to prevent that would be to say well what if you had a thousand dollars a month coming in no matter what right regardless of who you lived with regardless of what your educational status was regardless of what other job you had regardless of you know what part of the country you live in what if you had a thousand dollars a month coming in um and you didn't have to pay tax on it up until you're making$30,000 doing something else, there's good reason to think that people who get into sex work just to pay the electricity bill one month wouldn't need to because they have this other source of reliable income. So I think that there's good reason to think that something that looks like a basic income and we can call it by any name, but it's like a reliable cash transfer would have, the benefit of allowing people to choose from a broader array of options and make different kinds of choices if surrogacy and sex work and gamete donation, if these are things they don't want to do, they shouldn't have to do them. And a basic income might indeed be a solution to the kind of have to do it part of the equation. And then, of course, that would be true of all kinds of you know, labor that people would otherwise prefer not to perform, whether it's, you know, I don't know, janitorial, whether it's in the food industry, different people have different kinds of preferences about what they think is the worst kind of job out there, which I think is interesting in and of itself. Like people don't categorically agree that sex work is the worst thing they could imagine, right? Well, sex workers themselves,
SPEAKER_02:I mean, so this is again, jumping ahead to some other questions, but I mean, there is this sort of, as some of the students pointed out, in a lot of these conversations, a failure to listen to providers themselves about what they think are the worst jobs and what they're doing because there is no other choice and what they're doing because it's better than the poultry factory or agricultural work. There are so many bad jobs in the world. So,
SPEAKER_07:yeah. And an argument for basic income is just like, look, if this is, you don't want to do this bad job, you should not have to do it. And you know, somebody else might not think it's that bad a job and do it because a thousand bucks a month isn't enough to raise a family and obviously you got to keep working. So, but yeah, I think that, so thank you for that question because I do, I am kind of moving in my work towards making more explicit arguments for basic income as a solution to body market problems, to noxious market problems. So, yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Great. I am going to turn it over to Caitlin Stallings. We have two Caitlin's in the class. That's why I'm using last names. OK.
SPEAKER_06:Hi, Vida. Thank you so much for being here. I'm Caitlin Stallings, one of the Caitlin's. So my question is, how do we value the psychological benefit to a donor in a transaction? I know we talked in a previous podcast about the benefits that kidney donors specifically get psychologically and that that was super important in that industry. And does that benefit, at least in your mind, have any value? And if it does, would that make our current system relying on donations, refusing to commodify transactions any more fair?
SPEAKER_07:So it's a great question. And I think there's no reason that you couldn't offer an organ donor$10,000 and say, either we can give it to you in cash or we can donate it to a charity of your choosing. So then you have the additional bonus of having done something for an individual and feeling good about that life you saved. But then there's also the share of the cooperative good to which you've contributed is going and doing this additional good. And so people who are more interested in the sort of the act of beneficence would still be able to act beneficently without from the subjective sense, them being the only person to this transaction walking away with nothing. I mean, I also think like you have to take 10 days off work to recover, right? It's not like you get up and go back to work the next day after you've had an organ removed. So at the very least, the payment should be regarded as a type of compensation for like lost wages or time spent recuperating and the costs associated with that. So yeah, we can think about it either as compensation for lost wages or as money that will be paid in your name to a charity of your choosing. And so I think in those ways, we can still kind of hold on to the psychological value of beneficence. I'm just going to like float this. There was a really interesting article that came out in the fall and it sort of went viral. So there's a good chance that people in general may have encountered it. If you haven't, it was an article in the New Yorker called The Bad Art Friend.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_07:Okay. New York Times Magazine.
SPEAKER_02:We talk about that all the time. Yes.
SPEAKER_07:I haven't had, I feel like despite what I do, like I don't know enough people who've read that article and I'm always like, have you read it? Because I really want to break this down. Okay. So I was just going to flag, and I don't know whether like I'm suspicious of somebody's beneficent motives or if there's a weird suspiciousness out there with people's beneficent motives. But you know, you've already had this conversation. So yeah, I was just going to.
SPEAKER_02:Well, I will, I... choose any opportunity to rant about the bad art friend discourse because she might or might not have been annoying to people. I don't know, right? That's certainly the sort of Yeah. at worst you know she wanted to feel better about herself or wanted other people to pay attention to her who knows people people become do this for all sorts of very complicated reasons I think which is always the case with what we refer to as altruism most of which as you know Vita is not altruistic and sort of any sort of traditional definition of that word so yeah
SPEAKER_07:Yeah. And I just, to follow up on that, like what struck me as interesting is the anti-commodification rhetoric is always like, well, if you don't do it for money, you do it for altruism as though these two things are like completely distinct, but like self-interest can manifest in all kinds of different ways depending on what you're looking for. And so the idea that you're looking to get paid and that there's a slightly self-interested motive there, well, what if you're looking to get paid so you can like send your neighbor's kid to college, right? Like, Why is payment an automatic sign of self-interest, whereas altruism is like an automatic sign of beneficence, when perhaps it's a sign of like, I really want attention, right? So I thought it was interesting just for pointing out, like, this is not so black and white.
SPEAKER_02:And I think that that is even more true within family donation settings. And I just want to be careful in saying this. I'm not trying to demean anybody's motives or the act that they've done because it is either way a wonderful thing. But again, especially in family settings, people are donating for all sorts of complicated reasons, some of which are fascinating. self-interested or family-interested. I mean, a family is a unit, right? And so to me, it's just the notion that we think that people's motivations can be so simply broken down into sort of good altruism, bad altruism, monetary motives and now apparently bad attention-seeking motives that is really frustrating. I also just wanted to add that we had a podcast with Martha Gershon, an altruistic kidney donor who wrote a book, Kidney to Share. And I really think that it is worth people listening to and reading her book to get a sense of exactly how much uncompensated work kidney donors are doing right now. It is not just the operation and the risk and the recovery. She spent hundreds and hundreds of hours on sort of the work that honestly you would assume transplant centers and procurement organizations are doing, but that they aren't. And Martha was lucky that both she and her recipient are from a higher income bracket and could afford these things, but most can't. And I just think it's really important for people to recognize how much out of pocket in both a monetary sense and time and commitment and obviously health risk donors actually are putting into this. They're donating a lot more than just a body part at the end of the day. Caitlin, you had a second question about whether we should think about the commodification of different body parts differently, which I think will lead us into a line of questioning of which there were a number of questions about sort of the lens through which we view these anti-commodification questions. So I'm going to turn it over to you, Caitlin Stallings.
SPEAKER_06:So, yeah, my question was basically, should we differentiate between different body parts and whether they should be commodified? Because in my example, I said, you know, maybe eggs and sperm should be commodified, but maybe we shouldn't be able to sell an arm or a leg or some other, you know, sort of not essential for living, but essential body part. And I think you quoted Ann Phillips in your article who said we all have bodies and none of us would choose to sell them except under conditions of dire need. And I said, perhaps no one would give up their arm or leg without dire need. And that makes that seem a little bit more exploitative, but I wonder if that argument holds true with other body parts like kidneys, gametes, those types of things.
SPEAKER_07:Yeah, that's an interesting question. I used to, like when I first started down the path to this body of research, because like my doctoral research was on basically necessary goods and welfare state stuff and like So it was a circuitous route that led me into this current research project. And I did think that there was, at that point, a big distinction between what I thought I would cleverly call, in some book I still haven't written, parts and labor. Because something does intuitively strike me as different between kidneys and sex work. And when we are paying a kidney donor, we are paying for a good thing. tangible good apart, as it were. And when we are paying for sex, we are paying for a service. And I spent a long time really trying to parse that distinction and think through it morally and whether there was not just a sort of descriptive difference, but like a normative difference. And I have to admit, I like didn't get very far with it. So I'm curious to know what other people's instincts or intuitions are about this, because I think your example is really helpful. If we think about it in terms of arms and legs, it's much more of this like visceral, like, oh my God, you know, like, yes, you could function without it, but what a fundamental change to, in some sense, who you are as a person and who the world sees you as. I think, I do think losing the limb changes what you can do and be. not necessarily in a bad way, but it changes the set of things that you can do and be in a way that like losing some gametes or some plasma or even a kidney like does not. And so there are different kinds of parts. And so now there's this kind of like gradation in terms of like the value of parts that I think your question points to. And it's just in some way, like just complicated my thinking about this distinction between parts and labor. But I do think, Labor is something that we sell every day. Like you cannot go to work without taking your body with you, whatever it is you do, right? You can't answer phones. You can't be a cashier. You can't, I just went to visit my cousin who just, my little cousin, 20, it's her first job at a school and she's like working at a department store. And I went to visit her and just watching her, it's a big department store. I'm watching her run from one, like, you know, rack of clothes to another to get different sizes for her customers. She's moving her body all day. I was like, this is the most athletic scene I think. So you cannot work without selling your body in some way. So I just think that like assigning price values to the kinds of work we do with our bodies just seems to me to be like unproblematic. And when it's deemed problematic because it involves some intimate aspect of a woman's body, then I think we're just controlling women's bodies because- They have to take their body to work with them no matter what they're doing. So like, why these things? Why draw a line around these things? Parts, internal parts, limbs, kidneys, there's something different about that. You don't, you know, you don't sell those every day in order just to have a job. There's something distinctive about what you're selling there that you're not getting back. And so I don't have, I wish to, you know, telling you like, oh, I've been involved in this research project for 10 years. And that's the question that originally prompted it. And I don't have a better answer than that at this point. But that's the extent of my thinking on the problem and that I think it's an important one. It's a trenchant one.
SPEAKER_02:This is not an easy question, it seems to me, especially if we start looking at things like surrogacy and egg donation. Especially surrogacy, which seems to be perhaps a combination of labor and parts. Same thing. With egg donation, right? There's labor involved. Although honestly, now that I've heard Martha's story, I think I had underestimated the amount of labor involved in being a kidney donor. She had to go through a lot, including losing weight, bringing her blood pressure down, sort of all sorts of things. And so I'm not sure that the package of what is labor and what is a product are easy. Maybe that's one reason we're uncomfortable with these transactions because it's not easy. Yeah.
SPEAKER_07:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:That's a great point. Okay, so I'm going to turn this over to Navash. She's going to kick us off on this sort of start of a number of questions that we had sort of along the same lines here. Yes,
SPEAKER_11:so as was mentioned previously, this line of questions is kind of about the anti-commodification folks doing transactions through their own lenses and not necessarily through the lenses of the individuals involved in the transactions. So My question specifically comes from the liberalism commodification and justice article. So you talk about some of the widely known beliefs there about prostitution and commercial surrogacy. And this is a version of a question posed by another student, Jillian. But my question is, as we discuss these things, is there sufficient space and hear for the voices of individuals that are actually engaged in the transactions such that we actually know whether or not this is an account of their experiences and not just paternalistic concern.
SPEAKER_07:Yeah, this comes up. So, yeah, I mean, I think it's a great question. I think we have a much more outspoken movement of sex workers. And again, I can only, I'm speaking more to the Canadian context. So we have a much more outspoken contingent of sex workers who were integral in changing the federal law in Canada. There isn't the same kind of outspoken upswell on the part of surrogates. I'm inclined to think that's because so much of what happens in that industry in Canada happens under the table. So it's not that money isn't changing hands. It's just like, can't change hands above boards unless it's like compensation for vitamins. So I think, we're not hearing enough from surrogates here because they're worried and their agents and their representatives are worried that the more attention they draw to themselves, the more in violation of the existing law it's going to look like their current practices are. So long-winded way of saying, yes, I think we need to be hearing from the participants in these transactions as much as possible. But often the participants to these transactions have reasons of their own to try to stay quiet. And for many sex workers, that's because they don't want to self-identify yet. And for many surrogates, that's because they fear repercussions of a financial sort if they speak up that whatever money they are managing to get out of the respect of parents will then be lost also. So So you always have this problem when it's like, we need to find out more from the people involved. And yet the regulations imposed are such that the people involved don't want to speak on their own behalf for fear of various kinds of social or pecuniary reprimands. And so yes to your answer, yes to your question. And then how best do we go about, like, maybe we need to change some of these laws in order to make it such that they will feel comfortable being more vocal about their experiences rather than, right, expecting to hear about their experiences as a means to changing the laws.
SPEAKER_02:Okay, I'm going to turn it over to Courtney, who has a question along these same lines.
SPEAKER_10:Hi, my name is Courtney Inman. I'm also a 3L here at UVA. So my question kind of jumps off of the last one where So when I was reading through your paper on decommodification as exploitation, I started to get the sense that some of the proponents of the anti-commodification argument, they seem to like start with the conclusion they don't want something in the marketplace and then kind of add in premises just to support it, but there are a lot of holes within those premises. So for example, you mentioned a comment by Ann Phillips that exploitation is about inequality and not just inequality and outcomes, but the inequality that is at stake when one party to an arrangement treats the other as a being of lesser significance. And so when I was reading through this statement, I feel like it's not really an argument limited to the sale of body parts, bodily goods, or intimate services. saying that exploitation requires this treatment of another is one of lesser significance feels like it rests more on the motivations of the parties rather than the exchange itself. And additionally, whose perspective are we supposed to look at? The motives of the person paying or the motives of the person receiving payment? Ultimately, it just kind of felt like the anti-commodification argument devalued the perspective of the person receiving payment and overweighed the perspective of the person paying.
SPEAKER_07:It's really interesting. And so I think the exploitation views that I'm like talking about as wrongful use are ultimately like Kantian in orientation. And I don't know if that like, you know, is helpful in any way. But the worry is about like, you need to be a good person and you need to treat other people in the right way because that's you obeying the moral law, right? It's not consequentialist in its orientation where it's like, you need to treat people the right way because you're you maximize their happiness in so doing. It's like, you need to treat people in the right way because that's what makes you a good moral agent. And I think that was like a really good catch on your part to see that in what Anne Phillips was saying, because her argument is profoundly Kantian in that sense. we are all beings deserving of equal moral recognition and equal moral status. And so her view is, is like, if you're gonna treat somebody in a way that you would never wanna be treated, you know, that's not consistent with the categorical imperative. Like that's not consistent with like the ultimate principle of morality. And it's not, you're right. It's not really, although she says like, you know, beings deserve to be treated as moral, as equal moral agents. It is more about what's wrong with the person who's treating them otherwise, rather than the harm done to the individual who's been treated that way. And that was something, but now, and because this paper is still kind of in preparation, I have to be honest, like that comment is making me think, I wonder if that's like another thing I should throw in there as like something that's wrong with the dignity view, because you're right. Like, I think it shifts the focus away from the harm done to the vulnerable party and towards this kind of like, you know, I don't want to say harm done, but to this wrong done by the less vulnerable party. So like a good catch and thank you.
SPEAKER_02:Okay. I'm going to turn it over to Samantha.
SPEAKER_01:Hi, I'm Samantha and I'm a 2L. I have a two questions. And one of them is about the lens which people look at coercion. And I was wondering if you believe that people tend to look at coercion through their own lens, not through the lens of others. and essentially do well if individuals think that payment can be coercive and they only feel that way because they couldn't imagine a situation where they would let someone pay them for their organs because they have enough money and don't need that. So did they view themselves almost as protecting lower income individuals from this coercion that they themselves couldn't possibly face? And should they instead look at it from the lens of someone who could benefit from selling their organs?
SPEAKER_07:Yeah, I mean, I think... like psychologically, that's a very reasonable explanation. And I think that is also what like Ann Phillips is worrying about. And somehow I find that there's something that Ann Phillips says that I find very persuasive, which is like, I could never imagine doing these things unless I was profoundly desperate. And so when we pay somebody to do these things, we're like treating them as like people who are doing something we would just never imagine ourselves doing. So, but is that how- But
SPEAKER_02:Vida, I mean, philosophy professors can't imagine them doing most things that people do for money. Neither can law professors, to be clear. So I guess I'm, I just- I don't find these arguments persuasive. And I guess that doesn't mean that there's no reason to worry about these transactions, right? I just think it means that...
SPEAKER_07:That's not it. That's
SPEAKER_02:not it. I mean, it's depending on some other independent thing that it has to, it seems to me. Yeah. Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you.
SPEAKER_07:You're absolutely right. I think I agree with you. And I think... Yeah, as to the coercion question, this is where philosophers get involved and say, well, who cares how people think? People are wrong about how they think about a lot of philosophical concepts. So let's go in and do some tidying up. Well, Marie Kondo the heck out of this concept and be really clear about what the distinction is between coercing and incentivizing. So part of what I found frustrating in terms of wading into this literature is how many different and wrong understandings of coercion find their way into this literature on the part of anti-commodification theorists or on the part of like policymakers trying to make an intuitive claim about what's wrong with these kinds of arrangements. That somehow like in the public sphere, if you use the word coercion or exploitation, like, oh, your work is done. It has this like rhetorical force that I think captures something in folk psychology where people are like, oh God, we can't do that. but there's no clarity in the public domain about what coercion actually is or even what exploitation actually is.
SPEAKER_02:By the way, and as I told you in the email, I found your paper really, really helpful for clarifying some of these concepts. I don't think it's just sort of tidying up. I actually think that it really, being clear about what is the concern here helps us come up with wise policy choices. And I actually found the exercise that you went through in this and other papers to clarify these concepts to be super helpful and super important. So thank you for doing it.
SPEAKER_07:I mean, it's not my pleasure. It's torture, but I, but it's a torture. I keep subjecting myself to, I can't stop.
SPEAKER_02:Samantha, you had a two part question and I think you only asked one part.
SPEAKER_01:Uh, yes. The second part of my question goes to, I know, um, Some people try to make the argument that paying people for organs would degrade the worth of goods. But something I'm interested in hearing about is there aren't really any altruistic acts that benefit the community that would be eroded because they don't really exist in the first place. And a lot of what we've learned is that altruistic donations are really rare to begin with. So people that need organs don't end up getting them. So aren't we creating a greater injustice against the poor by not paying for organ donation, but also hurting everyone because the same people that look at it through the lens of I would never do this might need organs one day and don't have them because altruistic donations are so rare.
SPEAKER_07:Absolutely. I mean, all I can do is agree with that. I think like this is a life-saving issue that we're talking about. And this is a question of like limited supply and the more that we sort of morally sanction the people who would be willing to do it, but only in exchange for money, the worse we are all as a society in terms of further limiting the supply that's available to us. So I know you had Al Roth on here, and I know he had lots to say about this. So I won't try to do the job of a master. But yes, other than to say, I'm on board with that view.
SPEAKER_02:Madison, I'm going to turn it over to you.
SPEAKER_08:Yeah. So whenever I was thinking about this question, I was trying to think about something that is uncontroversially coercive. And so specifically in your paper, you talk about framing payment for bodily and intimate services rather than as like necessarily coercive as adding an option or providing another option for people that they can accept payment for these types of services. And I think that that's generally a good way to frame it. I have concerns about situations where the providers feel that they have no other option. So you mentioned earlier about people getting into sex work because they had to pay their electricity bill and like found this to be the way to do that. And so thinking through that, I kind of thought about a situation where somebody's boss tells them like, I will fire you if you don't sleep with me. you know, and unfortunately that has happened a lot. And only recently we're like, yes, this is very terrible. Um, but I think now for the most part, everybody says like, this is a very bad thing and we're very comfortable condemning it. Um, and so it felt like me that there's, or it felt to me like there's something similar to that. If you feel that say like you have to have money and you can't find another way to get access to the money that you need, um, In a quick enough fashion. And so in order to do that, you engage in sex work or you choose to sell a kidney or whatever the thing may be. In those cases, it feels to me that it's not necessarily just adding another option. And it seems like it's only adding another option to people who already have other options. And so I think for me, the thing that was similar between those two is what we talked about earlier of if you don't want to engage in sex, you shouldn't have to engage in sex. whether that's to not get fired or to get access to money. And so I'm just curious if you can help flesh that out a little bit.
SPEAKER_07:Yeah. So there's a lot to say in response to that. And I think I'm going to preface what I'm about to say with the following, which is even if I'm about to say that the example you've just given, well, no, that's not, I'm going to agree that the example you've just given is coercive, but I'm going to disagree that it's a like, or akin to the other kinds of examples that I've given. Now, even if I think that there is no, let me just, in cases where I think there isn't coercion, that doesn't mean I don't think there is some kind of wrongdoing. It's just that I wanna be clear about the type of wrongdoing that coercion constitutes. So what I think is unique about the case that you've given, and I'm, borrowing and probably bastardizing the view of Alan Wertheimer here who has a book on exploitation with a section on coercion and then who later went on to write a book on coercion because that section prompted so much discussion and generated so much feedback. Yeah, so this is, I'm gonna be kind of borrowing from what I think his answer would be here. And the answer I think would be that in the context of employment where you've been hired to do a job, the person who hires you to do that job takes on certain obligations to you, has certain obligations to you as their employee. And one of the obligations they have to you as their employee is not to threaten you with termination, except on, you know, immoral, arbitrary, immoral grounds that serve him. And so I'm not sure that's even necessary to the sex, although I think there's like additional wrongdoing the fact that he's asking for sex rather than for you to scrub his shoes every night or something that is definitely not in your job description. And so the relevant difference is that he has an obligation not to terminate you on arbitrary grounds. And if he then threatens you with termination on arbitrary grounds, he is violating an obligation that he already has a fiduciary obligation that he already has to you in virtue of your specific relationship. So he has in that sense created the conditions to take advantage of you. And when he then threatens you, I would want to count that as coercive and Alan Wertheimer would want to count that as coercive, right? But the difference with the cases I'm pointing to are ones where the person with whom you're transacting has no preexisting obligations to you, has no preexisting obligation to interact with you in one way rather than another way. Has no pre-existing obligation to make you an offer of$20,000 for your services to clean his eaves as opposed to carry his baby. If he did have a pre-existing obligation, to give you$20,000 to clean his eaves. And he said, instead, I want you to have sex with me. Like there's a violation of a preexisting obligation there to transact with you on specific terms. But if there is no preexisting obligation and an offer is extended, like, hey, I don't know you, you don't know me, but like, here's$20,000 to do a thing that I'd like done and that you might like to do. I see that as an addition, an incentive. The money is an incentive, not a coercive element. Whereas in a situation where somebody already has an obligation not to transact with you on advantage seeking terms, and then they proceed to do so, we have a coercive situation. And all the more so because I think the example that you gave is kind of like a your money or your life example, where you can't keep both things that you want. And that before the offer was made, you could have kept both things that you want, right? And now it's like, give me your job or your body, which before the offer was made, you could have kept both of, and now you can't keep both of, right?
SPEAKER_02:So Vida, can you, here's what stumped me a little bit about Madison's question. I had a, I struggled to answer it in a way that didn't seem sort of tautological. There are acceptable and unacceptable reasons for firing somebody. This is one that strikes me as being in the unacceptable category precisely because we have decided it's coercive, but I don't know which came first. first. Your boss can fire you for almost any reason, even if it's completely arbitrary, as long as it's not one of the protected categories. And we have defined this as being, as relating sufficiently to the protected category that we prohibit it. But is that just because we just decided that? I mean, you know, I guess I'm trying to figure out how ex ante I can draw a distinction between acceptable and unacceptable reasons for terminating you, given that the employer does in fact, it is the right of the employer to terminate you for all sorts of reasons.
SPEAKER_07:Well, I guess we're just coming at this question in slightly different ways because I think what the employer does in that scenario is coercive, but also 20 other things that are wrong. And so isolating each of those independent 20 wrongs could be an interesting exercise in and of itself. I do think it would qualify as coercive. And so hopefully the reasons that I gave are like, you know, useful enough to say like, yes, it's coercive because it involves a threat to make you worse off if you don't comply and that that threat is being offered by somebody who had an obligation precisely not to threaten you in that way. I feel like normally that's as far as I can go in terms of my thinking on this question. And so what you're asking is a really interesting question about like, what are the obligations of employers and like when, what kinds of conditions, under what kinds of conditions are like termination justified? Well, this is something I have to admit, I've just like never, I haven't given enough thought to as a like larger scale example. And I'd like to, I mean, you're asking some very interesting questions about that particular domain. I
SPEAKER_02:am satisfied to learn that you also feel that the employer's behavior is coercive in a different way from the example of just paying people. Because if we're going to go there, then to me, every job that a poor person does is coercive. Again, it has to depend on there being something special about sex work or intimate services or whatever that we haven't established yet.
UNKNOWN:Yeah.
SPEAKER_07:And I think like we want to be a bit, I don't know, again, this is the philosopher in me, but we want to be sparing with our use of certain concepts that carry a lot of normative force. And exploitation is one of those concepts and coercion is one of those concepts. They carry a lot of normative force. And so when they get used to describe a scenario, you know, The philosopher's immediate instinct is like, whoa, we want to reserve that for cases of wrongdoing of a particular kind because they carry so much normative force. And it does lead to this kind of scenario where we're like, everything's exploited. Labor exploitation is abundant. And yeah, I think any scenario in which a vulnerable person is offered something for a task they might otherwise not have done if they weren't vulnerable is going to qualify as coercive under this like broader, in the ways in which it's used in public discourse. And I just like Wertheimer, like, I just think that that's like, we're being sloppy with the concept, right? It means something more specific than that. And we need to, to have a more specific concept in order to apply it to cases of genuine coercion?
SPEAKER_02:I think we do, because if what we're really worried about is undue inducement as opposed to coercion, that suggests a different policy resolution than the one that thinking it's coercive would give us. And so for those of us who think about what is the setting in which people make these decisions and how can we make it more robust, it strikes me as something being an important distinction for how we think about what the answer is for how we address these questions. Okay, we wanted to shift from our discussion of physical goods as we've mostly been doing here to other types of goods. In particular, Autumn had a question about necessary goods, which I am going to turn over to her.
SPEAKER_09:So hi, I'm Autumn. I'm also a 3L at UVA Law. So I just kind of want to talk about how in your article you say how secondary education is necessary for adequate opportunity in our society. So thus it's provided at a public cost, but post-secondary education is not. So I believe in today's society that post-secondary education almost is necessary to get a job and maintain a stable income in our country. So I just wanted to see what you thought about how we define what is a necessary good and what should be commodified. And based on this, is it change over time? Is it based on culture? And just your thoughts on that.
SPEAKER_07:Good. So terrific question. And I think it's something that I absolutely agree with you that I guess I'm inclined to think that the necessary goods are the kinds of things that remain constant more or less, but the level of sufficiency is what changes historically and culturally. So how much is enough is something that changes over time. And if we've reached a point where post-secondary education is like indispensable to 80% of careers, Then, yeah, I mean, it needs to be subsidized the way that secondary education is subsidized. And I do think there has been a really radical shift in the last 20 years towards that being the case. And so our conception of what is necessary is defined by kind of like what is sufficient for education. this good to be adequately met in the name of opportunity, in the name of equality. So these are decisions for lawmakers, for policymakers. Have we reached the point where this particular good is only satisfiable to a sufficient degree if we now also include this additional thing? post-secondary education. So I think about this a lot in the context of healthcare too. And again, I'm coming from a place where we have a public healthcare system and where whenever there's sort of a new treatment discovery, we have to reconsider whether the inclusion of coverage for that treatment is now part of the package of necessary goods that we are being provided as Canadian citizens. And sometimes that's because we've discovered a new cure to a new disease. Sometimes it's because we've discovered a new disease. And so we now regard treatment for, you know, this new type of cancer we didn't know about before. For example, we now regard that as part of the package of what's necessary. The question of whether healthcare is a necessary good hasn't changed. The question is just like, what do we include in the package of sufficiency to say that we have satisfied that necessary good, like
SPEAKER_02:up to an adequate point. That's very helpful. I'm going to turn it over to Courtney again.
SPEAKER_10:Yeah, so along this line of thinking about the different types of goods, one of the things that I was thinking about throughout the article was how many of the systemic factors that lurk in the background of these arguments are kind of I guess the anti-commodification argument feels oversimplified in that it's ignoring a lot of these issues that can complicate an individual's choice. So for example, I was kind of unpersuaded by the anti-commodification argument that money should not be added to social or honorific goods because like such an addition would corrupt the enterprise itself. This just felt really oversimplified because I feel like money and inequality of wealth is always a background feature in the distribution of such goods. Like in class, we kind of talked about how it's a lot easier to get friends if you have the money to be able to afford to go out and hang out with people and attended a bunch of different events. Or a lot of people who get ahead in their career start off by having the opportunity to pay for the best education, best training, best supplies. And sure, at the end of the day, they may be contributing to society in some manner, but it just felt really inauthentic to say that money isn't already part of it. and like the distribution of such awards and honors. And it kind of felt like this was another limitation on the corruption argument itself, because at the end of the day, how much can we really say that social and honorific goods aren't distributed by market mechanisms?
SPEAKER_07:Yeah, that's an interesting question. And I mean, I think it is an interesting question. Like, do we have to be, yeah, do we have to be in some kind of certain income bracket in order to even like have time to make friends? Because otherwise we're like, or working three jobs to pay the rent, who's got time to socialize? And if we acknowledge that these are important goods essential to flourishing, and again, that's like their argument, then yeah, there is some, I guess I would say, and I may change my answer later. So like this is, I'm gonna float an answer and see where it goes, that there is maybe a distinction between arguments of justice and arguments against anti against commodification. So I think the corruption theorists are worried about assigning price values to certain kinds of goods. Whereas many other political philosophers are worried about like distributing goods in a way such that everybody has access to them. And sometimes markets frustrate the ability of everybody to gain access to certain goods. And that's the problem with the market. Right. But sometimes the problem with the market is just that it puts a price tag on things that should be valued beyond price. So the corruption theorists are the ones who are saying what's wrong with the market is it assigns a value, a price value to something that should be valued beyond price. Not that when we assign a price value to things that should be valued beyond price, we somehow impede the ability of other people to participate. because that strikes me as a kind of like justice-based or equality-based argument in favor of, I'm not sure, in favor of like government sponsored dances or socials or like recreational facilities, which is something that the state does spend money on in order to facilitate community interaction. But that type of argument against intervening in a market is a slightly different type of argument than a corruption argument. So what annoys me about the corruption argument is that the view is we shouldn't assign price values to certain goods full stop, not because some people can't get access to them once we do that, but simply because it like corrupts the good itself. And I was trying to like be charitable and say the only realm in which I think I could even conceive of this argument working is when we're talking about Nobel prizes. or talking about marriage in an ideal sense, which is to say, yeah, like bride buying seems wrong and prize buying seems wrong because it corrupts what the good is supposed to be that you're acquiring. And it corrupts it in a very definitional sense. I think the argument that you're getting at, which is that not all people can have access to these things, is an argument from inequality and not an argument from corruption. And you're right that maybe when we think about these goods, we've only really thought about them through corruption lenses and never really thought about them through equality lenses. And so maybe the way to treat them is to like, Put them into the group of necessary goods. And then think about what kinds of obligations we have to make sure everybody has an equal chance of making friends.
SPEAKER_02:For me, I don't find the prize buying and bride buying, by the way, to be comparable examples. Prize buying is specifically allocated according to something else that we care about, say respect or accomplishment. And when we pay for it, it doesn't mean that thing anymore. That is a corruption example I can actually live with. Whereas the notion that bride buying corrupts what marriage is supposed to be is dependent on a particular definition of marriage that's culturally dependent and not shared throughout all the world. And plenty of places have successful relationships, even in the buying is a loaded term, but plenty of places around the world have different conceptions of dowry and the like and still have successful marriages.
SPEAKER_07:Let me strike that example from my previous answer because you're absolutely right. I could have given plenty of others and I wish
SPEAKER_02:I had
SPEAKER_07:given that
SPEAKER_02:one. Okay, let me turn it over to Jackson.
SPEAKER_03:Hi, I'm Jackson Bailey. I'm also throughout EVA law. And my question had to do with your argument about payment being a form of respect. I agree with the premise that non-payment can be seen as a form of disrespect for someone's time or effort that they put into something. But is it a legitimate to worry that introducing payments for body parts or sex work will lead to valuing some people over others? For example, some sex workers becoming more expensive than others or certain demographics, their body parts are more expensive than other people's? Or is this something that is already happening and so some form of payment is better than no payment?
SPEAKER_07:To some extent, this is already happening. and efforts to curtail it have caused more problems, as Kim knows very well, in the gamete domain, has caused more problems than it has solved.
SPEAKER_03:Following up with that question, you discussed self-respect as a rationale for why we should be wary of allowing sex work due to its potential to affirm negative views of women in society. So how does payment as a form of respect interact with The fact that paying for sex work might actually cause negative views of women to grow in society.
SPEAKER_07:Okay. So the reason I was prompting that was because I want to tell you what an excellent question it is. And this was the question that I was most worried about getting when I published this paper, because you've caught a You've caught me in an inconsistency that I am uncomfortable with, and I'm glad that you did, because I need to think about how to address this inconsistency. It's funny, because when I was writing the LCJ paper, Liberal Quantification and Justice, I was like, as I was making the argument about the social basis of self-respect, The thing that kept coming up to me was that, I think I say it in one paragraph, oh yeah, but underpayment is also kind of disrespectful. How serious an objection to my case is this? And the question, how serious an objection to my case is this, is what prompted me to write this second paper. So I was so convinced by my own objection to my own argument that I was like, I need to follow this I need to follow where this leads. And so coupled with my interest in trying to demonstrate to anti-commodification theorists that they couldn't just have their way with exploitation theory, my motive was to try to address my own objection or my own worry about my own view in the previous paper. And here's the way I think I can get out of the problem, but I'm not sure... I'm not sure it's the right way to get out of the problem. So the quick way to get out of the problem is to say, well, all I was trying to do in the first paper was demonstrate that a liberal could make a case about body parts and intimate services. Here is what a Rawlsian would have to say in the face of all these people saying like, oh, liberals have nothing to say about you know, about body markets in particular, but all these other markets too. It's like, oh, if everybody's consenting, then there's nothing wrong. A liberal can't say anything more about what's wrong if they're consensual. And I wanted to try to demonstrate in that paper, no, the liberal can say more. The liberal can go by way of the concept of a social basis of self-respect and say more. That in fact, these kinds of practices might, as social practices, undermine the social basis of women's self-respect as a group women. And I think that's something that the liberal can say. There has been this tension in talking about sex work and now surrogacy for decades, if not longer, about where the relevant harm lies. Is it to a particular disadvantaged social group or is it to particular individuals who participate in surrogacy? certain kinds of transactions. So the individuals who participate in certain kinds of transactions, they can be harmed by the transaction, they can be benefited by the transaction, but there's this additional worry, which is like what Deborah Satz would call like a third party harm, right? And it's the third party harms that I'm looking at in the first paper, that is harms to women as a group. It undermines the self-respect of women as a group. And in the second paper, I'm looking at harms to participants to these transactions and the ways in which denying them payment and using respect-based arguments to justify or dignity-based arguments to justify refusing them payment creates harms for participants, for first parties. So the two ways to get out of the objection, which is a really serious one as far as I'm concerned, is to say, well, In the first paper, I'm just talking about what liberalism could offer. I'm not endorsing it. I'm just describing it. The second thing I could say is, well, in the first paper, I'm talking about women as a group and harms to third parties. Whereas in the second paper, I'm talking about harms to first parties. But having said both of those things, I am a Rawlsian. So it's like a problem that for me to be able to say, well, this is what a Rawlsian could say, but I'm not going to say that because like, I kind of want to be able to say what the Rawlsian says. So although I could give that answer, it's still a problem for me. And the other answer I've just given is also a problem for me because in order to know what to do about these things, do we prioritize protecting first parties or do we prioritize protecting third parties? And like kind of like lean towards protecting first parties rather than protecting third parties from, you know, stereotyping, we should be protecting first parties from exploitation, which seems like a more grievous harm. So I think what I want to say is what I've said in the second paper. But I see that there's a conflict there with what I've said in the earlier paper. And I think I just have to kind of acknowledge that I was so worried by my own objection to my own argument in my first paper that I have changed my view. somewhat in response, or at least that I'm playing, these two papers represent me like playing with the two positions that I might take and trying to decide which one feels like my position. And luckily as academics, we have the freedom to kind of play with the views that we're comfortable with and decide where we're going to find ourselves on this, on the map that we've created for ourselves. So long-winded answer, but I was grateful for the opportunity to like to delve into it. I'm glad somebody identified that tension because it's kind of been bothering me. And I'm worried that when this paper gets published in the next year, other people will ask me the same question. I have to really give some thought to how I'm prepared to answer it.
SPEAKER_02:Avita, one question I would like to ask you is how seriously we should really take these purported third party harms. And I guess, and just to be clear, it's not that I think that these transactions are unproblematic for what they say about the way in which we value women in particular. But the fact is that that's the society in which we live, right? I mean, the problem with these transactions is not that they create inequality or that they create women as being valued primarily for sex and reproduction. It's that, you know, that's a world we live in. And many women who are in the most vulnerable positions in our society will find it most beneficial to them to exploit those stereotypes and needs and inequalities and whatever it is that we live with every day. And so I guess I don't know, it's not that I don't think that the third party concern is true, it's that I don't know how seriously I am supposed to take it or why in a world in which in the world in which we live. It's just reflecting the reality. It's not, I'm sure one could argue that it reinforces reality, but that's all it's doing.
SPEAKER_07:Yeah, I think, yeah. So I guess the one thing that I would say about that is that like, am I then committed to saying something similar about altruism? Like these engendered altruism, like these practices are not just trading on the fact that it exists, they are perpetuating it. And in perpetuating it, they are causing harms for individuals. And so maybe that makes it easier because like there are individuals getting screwed metaphorically, right, by these transactions against the background of the gendered expectation of altruism. And these transactions are then further also reaffirming it. So there are very real first party harms there. I think that the expectation of gendered altruism creates third party harms too. But yeah, so maybe the distinction between, the claim about altruism is that we can identify who it's hurting rather than, you know, what damage it's doing to the reputation of a social group.
SPEAKER_02:Okay. I'm going to turn it over to Alex for our last question. I'm skipped around just a little bit in the interest of time.
SPEAKER_04:Thank you for joining us today. My name is Alex and I'm another 3L here at UVA. And I had a couple of questions. I'll try to combine them, I think. The first is you say that you want to reject the connection between personhood and body parts so that you can argue that it's the lack of payment that is sort of an attack on the respect of women. And I wonder if that does that reduce the potency of the respect interest, because now we're talking about women just as retailers of goods or just as people who take place in the market rather than as, you know, people. I think that when we think about self-respect, we often think of it in sort of a personhood centric manner. So how do you, how do you square that? Well, I have another question about the unfair outcome criterion, which is, but yeah, the question is, can we take personhood, the personhood interest out of the equation and still rely on the social basis of self-respect or is that sort of too elusive a category? How does that play?
SPEAKER_07:Good. So the question is, excellent. And I have to say something that I hadn't thought about and that my two editors of this paper didn't catch either. So I think philosophers should be forced to go before a panel of lawyers often because this is really, really helpful. I, you know, anyway, that was a very good catch. So, and I thought about, I thought about, you know, I'm like thinking about how to answer that. And I, I'm gonna rephrase your question and tell me if I've captured it correctly, but if we remove, if we sever the connection between like body and personhood, which I claim to want to do, like if these people are using like a Kantian account of personhood and then they claim, well, the body is too much a part of who we are to sell it, then I'm objecting to their conception of personhood being attached to the body if what really mattered to Kant was autonomy, right? Then we should be concerned with promoting choice rather than protecting the body. So that's the argument that I take it that you're alluding to. And then I later go on to talk about like bodily integrity as grounds for, restrictions in these kinds of markets, that there are certain kinds of ways in which these markets might bear out that would include violations of bodily integrity and that those would be cases in which we could constrain the markets. So you're absolutely right, or at least it made me really pause and ask myself, if I want to make a claim about the right to bodily integrity and it being tied up to the right to refuse medical interventions, etc., do I have to soften my position on the relationship between the body and the self? And here's another case where, because this is such a good question, I'm going to float you an answer. And it may not be the answer that I take with me through the rest of my, I may have to like think even more about how I've answered you after I've answered you. I think that what I would want to try to say is that when I'm talking about bodily integrity, I'm not understanding that the integrity itself as connected to the self. I think that what it's still connected to is autonomy. And the reason that bodily integrity matters is because it's connected to autonomy. So if you were to say, I'm giving up my kidney, I'm putting up my kidney as collateral for a loan. And then the creditors come to take it away and you're like, no, it's the no part that matters. If you were like, yeah, okay, that's fair. Like I agree to this, you know, anesthetize me, let's get this over with. Then that's the relevant distinction, right? And it's the same with like all medical interventions. If a surgeon is proposing to remove a a sickly organ. If you're saying, no, don't touch me. Even if the organ is sickly, like the surgeon is not allowed to go get it, right? That's your right to refuse medical intervention. If the organ is sickly and the surgeon is saying, we're going in to get it. And you're like, yes, please, please go get it. That's the relevant. So it's still your ability to consent or withhold consent that is relevant with respect to the right to bodily integrity. And so the bodily integrity thing kind of piggybacks on this like, on this conception of autonomy to which we attach the authority to give consent where the body is concerned. And, you know, there's still a problem lingering there because that's the same thing that gives us the authority to give consent where the other goods in our possession are concerned. Like, can your creditors come and take your piano? Oh, no, please don't. My grandmother gave me that piano. Right? Like, so... Are we then left, and I think this is what you were getting at, treating kidneys like pianos, just like things in our possession that we have the right to say yes or no to parting with. And there's a problem with that view of bodily self-ownership, but that might have to be a bullet I bite and be prepared to bite if what I'm saying to you is that I think what bodily integrity is relevant to is your capacity to give consent to with respect to the things that you own and your body being one of those things.
SPEAKER_02:Thank you so much, Bita, for doing this. This has been a lot of fun.
SPEAKER_07:I mean, there were so many great questions and I'm not even joking about like, I really think philosophers should have to like present their work to lawyers more often.
SPEAKER_02:Well, and probably vice versa. The silos we work in are sort of weird.
SPEAKER_07:There's like a little echo chambery, but yeah, you guys caught some great stuff. These were really, really terrific questions. And I was very excited for the opportunity, really for the first time to discuss these two papers at the same time, because they are kind of, they're treating the same subject, but they are kind of moving in different directions. And I haven't yet had the opportunity to discuss those two directions with people. So I'm grateful for your engagement and your insight on that. Thank you so much, everyone.
UNKNOWN:Thank you.
