from Jason Brennan:
Peter Jaworski and I have a book on commodification, Markets without Limits, coming out next month. Our thesis is that any service or good that you may give away for free, you may sell for money.
Pointer from Bryan Caplan.
If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing for a profit. That sounds like what I said about Planned Parenthood controversy. If harvesting body parts from aborted babies is ok, then they should be allowed to profit from it. But if it’s not ok, then doing it for free would not make it better.
I think that the Planned Parenthood case is easily distinguished from, say, commercial sex by information asymmetries and assumption of risk versus reward.
In particular, the patient (pregnant woman) assumes a higher risk if an abortion is carried out with the objective of obtaining a more-intact fetus than if it is carried out with the objective of minimizing injury to the woman. This increase in risk is why federal law (as I understand it) prohibits performing an abortion differently in order to obtain fetal parts. Planned Parenthood does not carry any significant share of that risk, probably does not clearly communicate or explain the risk before asking patients to opt-in to harvesting, and does not compensate the patient for that risk. I believe that compensating the patient for the risk would be clearly illegal under federal law that bans paying for fetal parts, and would look even worse in the political arena.
The service provider is usually considered to have a duty of care towards the patient, but might profit from a risk assumed by another party. This conflict of interest justifies restraints on the service provider — although one might reasonably differ on whether it is justifiable to simply open the market on fetal parts, prohibit for-profit trade in fetal parts, and/or require abortion providers to clearly communicate the (current scientific knowledge and assessment of) risks from particular choices about the abortion.
How about this scenario. A woman has some particular special genetic characteristic that makes her intact fetuses worth a small fortune (like eggs and sperm from certain folks are worth a lot). So, she contracts with the research company to be a ‘surrogate’ and gets pregnant on purpose to abort at the latest legal limit to correct the money, and indeed makes a good living doing this as a career while still fertile. In other words, her interest in the abortion is almost strictly venal and commercial, and there is no cause for sympathy or compassionate relaxation of social rules.
My hunch is that this case would strike many people as district and less tolerable, even though there may be no principled way to reconcile that with their other stated positions. Abortion is not usually embraced by most of its supporters as a morally meaningless affair and a matter of absolute discretion independent of the presumption of some kind of special distressing burden on the woman. It is usually framed as a kind of indispensable contingency so that a woman can choose the lessar of two evils.
Adding financial incentives on top of that could encourage people to choose the greater evil, nullifying the intent of the permissive policy. Indeed, abortion advocates make this claim all the time, saying that if the state makes abortion legal but too expensive or inconvenient – even fails to subsidize – then that ‘forces’ poor women to choose the greater of evils (from their point of view).
Anti abortion advocates could make the same claim in the other direction: any allowance of invectives for financial gain on the part of anyone involved in the enterprise, above some minimal point necessary to accomplish the procedure in presumptively sympathetic cases, would distort the market equilibrium further in the direction of greater evils.
One problem is that PP advises women. Making a profit on the decision compromises the veil of objectivity. This isn’t that special except for the decisions involved.
Sooooo….it isn’t okay. But in most other circumstances we don’t care.
Also, what if one considers that the p of being okay versus not okay is neither one nor zero?
This is what I’m calling “maybe libertarianism.” What if we don’t have to decide binarily whether abortion is right or wrong but maybe?