Lecture 5: Hired Guns

What this lecture covers

This lecture uses two extended debates to probe the limits of consent in the marketplace: whether paying for military service is fair or coercive, and whether a surrogate motherhood contract should be enforced even when the birth mother changes her mind. Both cases test the same underlying question the course keeps returning to: when does an apparently free exchange actually involve coercion or a failure of the market to respect what's really being traded.

After watching, you can explain the difference between the Civil War buyout system, the all-volunteer army, and outsourcing to mercenaries, and you can describe the two main objections to commercial surrogacy raised in the Baby M discussion.

Key ideas

• The Civil War buyout system: drafted men could pay a substitute to serve in their place, a practice most students judge unjust despite defending today's paid volunteer military.
• The coercion objection: choices made under severe economic inequality may not be truly free, even when no one is forced at gunpoint.
• Patriotism versus market pay: a debate over whether military service should be treated as an ordinary job or as a civic obligation bound up with duty to country.
• Commodification: the question of whether some things, like military service or reproduction, are degraded by being bought and sold.
• The Baby M case: a real 1980s legal dispute over a surrogacy contract, in which the birth mother sought to keep the child after previously agreeing to give her up for a fee.
• Tainted consent: an agreement can be invalid not just from coercion but also from a lack of information the party could not have had in advance, such as how she would feel about the child.
• Elizabeth Anderson's critique: some goods, including love and parental bonds, are properly valued in ways other than market use, and treating them as commodities can be a form of alienation.

Walkthrough

Judging the Civil War buyout system (6:18)

Sandel presents three ways a government might fill its ranks: raise pay, use conscription, or hire mercenaries. Most students favor higher pay for the current volunteer army but reject the historical Civil War hybrid, in which drafted men like Andrew Carnegie could pay a substitute to serve in their place. Students argue the buyout system amounted to coercion for the poor, since the wage that induced a substitute to fight barely mattered to the wealthy.

Does the volunteer army face the same objection? (13:25)

A student, Emily, challenges the class: if paying a substitute during the Civil War was coercive given economic inequality, why isn't today's all-volunteer army, whose ranks are disproportionately drawn from lower-income backgrounds, open to the same objection? The class debates whether patriotism, rather than pay, is the real motivating force for today's soldiers, and whether that motivation argues for a return to conscription instead of a paid, market-based force.

Egg and sperm donation as a market (27:47)

Sandel shifts to reproductive markets, describing real advertisements offering large sums for eggs from donors with specific academic and physical traits, and the marketing practices of a commercial sperm bank. These examples set up the question of whether reproductive capacities should be treated as ordinary goods for sale.

The Baby M surrogacy case (32:53)

Sandel narrates the case of Mary Beth Whitehead, who contracted to be a surrogate mother for William and Elizabeth Stern for a $10,000 fee, then sought to keep the child after giving birth. Students split over whether the contract should have been enforced: some argue a deal is a deal, while others argue the birth mother could not have known in advance how she would feel about the child, making her earlier consent incomplete.

Is surrogacy dehumanizing? (40:05)

A second line of objection emerges: a student, Andrew, argues that commercial surrogacy resembles baby-selling and is dehumanizing regardless of whether consent was informed. Sandel connects this to philosopher Elizabeth Anderson's argument that some goods, including parental love, are properly valued through modes other than market use, and reports that the New Jersey Supreme Court ultimately voided the Baby M contract on both consent and commodification grounds.

Before you watch

• Watch Lecture 3 on libertarianism first, since this lecture continues testing whether market exchanges are truly free under real-world conditions.
• No further background is required beyond familiarity with the course's recurring theme of consent.

Check your understanding

1. Why did most students consider the Civil War buyout system unjust while defending today's all-volunteer army?
2. What is Emily's challenge to defenders of the all-volunteer army, and how did students try to answer it?
3. What two distinct objections were raised against enforcing the Baby M surrogacy contract?
4. What does Elizabeth Anderson mean by saying some goods should not be treated merely as objects of use?