Tyler
Cowen, in response to a post from Bryan
Caplan, argues:
Bryan writes:
On adoption: I think that adoption is a noble, generous act,
and admire those who do it. But I
personally don't want to adopt.
I can't disagree with any word in that first sentence, but it
leaves me uneasy. Bryan's
forthcoming book — Selfish Reasons to
Have More Kids — is about…selfish reasons to have kids. (It will, I promise you, be very
interesting and make a splash.) So
here is my challenge to Bryan: write down the ten most important selfish
reasons to have kids and then ask how many of them apply to adopted
children. Most of them will. Which isn't to say those are the only
reasons to adopt (or have) kids, but they are real nonetheless. So why do the adopting parents
seemingly get described as selfless martyrs? It's almost as if the selfishness, without the replication
angle, has to be stuffed into a box somewhere. Do all those selfish reasons for having kids require
replication as a kind of amplifying mechanism, without with we are left with
the slightly underwhelming purely altruistic motives?
From the remainder of the post, I gather that Cowen does not
necessarily agree that the primary reasons to have (or adopt) children are
selfish ones, though he leaves this aside for the sake of argument. Instead, the point is that both
biological and adoptive parents become parents for similar reasons – selfish
ones, under Caplan’s definition — yet Caplan believes the reasons of the
biological parent are primarily selfish, whereas those of the adoptive parent
are depicted as primarily generous.
This is to me a quite fascinating post, as the (ir)relevance
of motive is a topic I cover at length in both teaching and research (See, for
example, prior posts here
and here). And I’ve frequently wondered
why one transaction is routinely characterized as at least partially altruistic
(e.g. egg donation, blood donation, surrogacy), whereas reasonably similar
transactions are assumed to be largely or wholly selfish (e.g. sperm and plasma
donation).
But this difference in the presumed motives of adoptive
versus biological parents is not one that had occurred to me before. In prior work,
I’ve theorized that characterizing particular transactions as selfless or
altruistic is a means of normalizing otherwise jarring events – for example,
mothers are supposed to love their children, not sell them for profit. Thus the characterization of commercial
surrogacy and oocyte donation as primarily altruistic, selfless acts may reduce
the dissonance associated with cash-for-motherhood transactions.
Is it possible that a similar move is at work with
adoption? And, if so, what is the
discord that must be normalized?
Adoption is no longer particularly unusual in this day and
age, of course – many of us adopt children ourselves or know others who have
done so. But, as Viviana Zelizer documents,
the sentimental value of children (the economically “worthless,” but
sentimentally “priceless” child, as she puts it) is a relatively recent
development. Historically,
children who were not genetic offspring (thus serving no evolutionary impulse) were
valued primarily for their ability to contribute to household income. (I discuss this social transformation
and its impact on the baby market in more depth here).
Today’s adoptive “priceless” children provide neither gene
survival nor economic contribution.
This would, it seems, make today’s adoptions selfless acts, as judged by
historical standards.