Jens Spahn's resignation has shown that anyone who evades the ban here by using a surrogate mother in the USA will still be morally condemned - even though they are not violating any law. Defenders of surrogacy, on the other hand, argued that this was also a transaction between two contracting parties who had entered into this contract voluntarily, comparable to transactions such as the sale of organs or prostitution. And they add the accusation that the opponents of surrogacy are only so rigorous in their condemnation of it because they themselves are not affected by the emergency.
The sociological research question is obvious: Do people as outsiders apply the same moral standards that they would apply if they themselves were directly affected?
This question of double standards in morally controversial situations can hardly be answered with the usual surveys. In a laboratory experiment, the two Berlin social researchers Hande Erkut and Dorothea Kübler therefore divided subjects into groups whose beliefs about the moral acceptability of transactions were tested, depending on whether they were only spectators, beneficiaries or representatives of the weak party, whose freedom of choice was restricted by their direct involvement. All three groups were able to ban the respective transaction. In addition, there were variations between mild and severe consequences as well as the lack of and full ability of the weak party to act. Could it be proven in this way that high moral standards are abandoned under the pressure of personal disadvantages?
Those who benefit judge more leniently
As the experiment showed, bystanders and weak stakeholders would prohibit transactions with severe consequences to a very similar extent. The favored party, on the other hand, is much less likely to advocate banning them. The role of the ability to act in the experiments is also noteworthy: all three groups are less likely to prohibit transactions if the weak party did not feel forced, i.e. voluntary action can be assumed.
Surprisingly, this also applies to the favored party. The weaker counterpart's lack of ability to act undermines the acceptance of the transaction, even from their perspective. Conversely, one could probably conclude that the beneficiaries of surrogacy - for example a homosexual couple - make their decision to use surrogacy easier with the conviction that the surrogate mother paid for it is actually not in any distress and therefore has “agency”.
The results show that “judgments of disgust” are to a certain extent “self-serving”: those who benefit from a transaction judge more leniently, while outsiders are more outraged. Mere spectators also tend to look for the side of the weaker party - similar to what is known from research on distribution experiments, according to which uninvolved observers tend to have more egalitarian attitudes than those directly involved.
However, the study did not want to be satisfied with an exclusively experimental design and therefore also surveyed the participants' attitudes towards such topics as organ markets, surrogacy and prostitution. It turned out that those who reject such transactions also evaluate them more morally critically, score higher on “individualizing” basic moral values such as fairness and tend more towards left-wing political positions. Left-wing participants were more likely to be against controversial transactions, while right-wing participants were significantly more open to such transactions.
The authors conclude that “judgments of disgust” are at least partly driven by interests. A possible political consequence of this: One would have to ensure that the weak party has real ability to act in such controversial transactions, for example to prevent it from being forced into the transaction due to economic necessity. Then the interests of viewers and both contracting parties could come closer together. Since lack of agency is often linked to poverty, the authors suspect that such controversial transactions may be more likely to find public support in more egalitarian societies. This could be a starting point for future research into how social factors shape moral judgments.
