Legalizing X doesn’t just mean you can do X if you want to. Legalizing X helps normalize X, and gives other people license to expect you to do X. When child labor was legal, society could expect the poor to rent their children to mines and factories. Were the poor forced to rent their children at gunpoint? Well, no. They were coerced by economic circumstance, as usual.
If you legalize a way to mitigate desperate poverty, then the desperately poor can be expected to do that. And those who refuse will be seen as unsympathetic and unworthy of assistance. After all, how can you say you’re really poor? You have an idle ten-year-old and a perfectly good spare kidney!
Do you have evidence of this happening? Poor people can already sell platelets and I’ve never heard someone say “This person doesn’t deserve help because they haven’t sold platelets,” even though platelet sale is much easier than kidney sale. Why would you assume that in a world where people feel strongly enough about this to ban kidney sales that they’d sudden do an about-face and try to force kidney sales? It’s the same people before and after.
Your child labor example gets to exactly the problem the post mentions. People didn’t send children to work in the mines because it was normalized, they did it because they needed the money! People don’t do that anymore because we’re much, much richer now and don’t need to. Banning child labor in the 1800′s would have been very bad because starvation is worse than working in a mine.
Legalizing X doesn’t just mean you can do X if you want to. Legalizing X helps normalize X, and gives other people license to expect you to do X. When child labor was legal, society could expect the poor to rent their children to mines and factories. Were the poor forced to rent their children at gunpoint? Well, no. They were coerced by economic circumstance, as usual.
If you legalize a way to mitigate desperate poverty, then the desperately poor can be expected to do that. And those who refuse will be seen as unsympathetic and unworthy of assistance. After all, how can you say you’re really poor? You have an idle ten-year-old and a perfectly good spare kidney!
Do you have evidence of this happening? Poor people can already sell platelets and I’ve never heard someone say “This person doesn’t deserve help because they haven’t sold platelets,” even though platelet sale is much easier than kidney sale. Why would you assume that in a world where people feel strongly enough about this to ban kidney sales that they’d sudden do an about-face and try to force kidney sales? It’s the same people before and after.
Your child labor example gets to exactly the problem the post mentions. People didn’t send children to work in the mines because it was normalized, they did it because they needed the money! People don’t do that anymore because we’re much, much richer now and don’t need to. Banning child labor in the 1800′s would have been very bad because starvation is worse than working in a mine.