Are We Really Getting Morally Better?

The more things supposedly change, the more they really stay the same.  That’s especially true when we try to talk about moral progress.

Barack Obama loved telling us that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”  Joe Biden always assures us that history is moving towards “progress,” which is why we’re lectured to be “on the right side of history” (which is usually the left side).

None of this is new.  It all comes from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who claimed history is on auto-pilot towards greater moral progress, ever higher moral vistas—he said that right after dropping off his five kids from his mistress at an orphanage, on his way to writing Émile, his book about how to raise children.

Take last week: January 4th marked the 128th anniversary of Utah’s admission as the 45th state.  Utah was an outlier, as most of the states around it (except Arizona and New Mexico) had joined the Union earlier, even though almost all of them were settled later.  Brigham Young was in the Great Salt Desert by the late 1840s, and the “State of Deseret” was seeking admission before the Civil War.  What took Utah so long?

One word: polygamy.

19th century Republicans, like some of their 20th and 21st century heirs, were into fighting culture wars.  The 1856 platform—the GOP’s first presidential race—pledged to combat the “twin relics of barbarism,” slavery and polygamy.  1865 and the end of the Civil War resolved the former.  (MEMO: send note to Nikki Haley).  Republicans then turned to polygamy, not resting until federal laws punished polygamy and Utah was compelled to write its prohibition into its first state constitution.  As Princeton Prof. Robert George observed, it was Republicans who fought the moral scourges of the nineteenth century.

Looking back at our moral “progress,” I wonder if we don’t owe Utahans an apology.  Maybe, in fact, we should actually kick Utah out and admit Deseret instead.

After all, moderns declare that “love is love.”  Well, if “love is love,” why do the number of persons involved matter?  Indeed, if one is quantitatively prolific, isn’t he arguably more loving?

What we once called “polygamous” we today call “polyamorous.”  It’s not just po-ta-to/po-tah-to.  “Polygamy” presupposes marriage and plural nuptials are (currently) banned in all fifty states.  But since marriage itself now competes with a plethora of other “relationship” models, as well as having been itself redefined as essentially whatever the spouses want it to be, polyamory—plural relationships not (yet) marriage—is blossoming.  Somerville, Massachusetts already recognizes them.

And, if “love is love,” why not?

So, as long as we are resurrecting ancient barbarisms under new labels, how about the push in Michigan to legalize commercial baby-buying, AKA “commercial surrogacy?”  Michigan’s lower house already signed on; the legislative package is now pending in the Senate.

The legislation explicitly redefines “parenthood” to exclude genetics or biology, at least as they apply to surrogacy.  Sharing your DNA with the child through your gametes does not make you a “parent” (at least according to sponsor Rep. Samantha Steckloff, Democrat of Farmington Hills).  You just provided parts.  Nor does sharing your body through your womb make you a “parent.”  You’re just a living incubator, rented for nine months.

Proponents of surrogacy will tug at the heartstrings, demanding sympathy for adults who “want to have children but can’t.”  But while we may empathize, we need to be wary of putting the cart before the horse.  Because, in order to accommodate the wants of adults, we are bludgeoning the rights of children.

We are saying children’s genetic heritage doesn’t matter. We are saying that the body within whom one grows and develops is just a vessel, an animate incubator that provides warmth and nutrition until the agreed upon delivery date for the goods.  “Just sign here….”

But, perhaps most important of all, we are saying that Michigan’s laws should—at least in the case of surrogacy—set aside genetic and biological relationality in preference to other criteria.

Like polyamory, we have precedent for the surrogacy “parenting” arrangement, too.  In ancient Rome, a father’s will trumped genetics and biology.  Because the child was presented to the father of the house (who was also usually the child’s father), he decided whether that child might be honored to have him as “father.”  If father refused his fatherly name and responsibilities, the child could be left abandoned with impunity in the woods.  This Roman version of Giubili’s and Minerva’s “post-natal abortion” proposal (and a few wolves) took care of “populations we didn’t want too many of,” like Down’s Syndrome children, medically distressed infants, or an excess of girls who represented asset-draining dowries.

Rep. Steckloff certainly wouldn’t give just any man such unlimited powers of patriarchy.  No, she reserves the right to confer the honor of being called “parent” to someone with a big enough checkbook to pay for conceiving and gestating-on-demand a biologically orphaned baby.  Eugenic and quality control issues can now be prenatally addressed through Michigan’s unreserved “fundamental right of reproductive freedom,” so much less visible than a she-wolf.  (On the other hand, the Capitoline Wolf saved Romulus’s and Remus’s lives).

Plus ça change….

Image generated by AI.