Dr. Benjamin Spock is the child-rearing expert, Mr. Spock is the Vulcan science officer from Star Trek. Regardless of how you feel about the good doctor, it appears that Vulcans make lousy sources for child-rearing principles.
I have in mind a story a student relayed to me this past spring. I must admit that I was not present during these events, so what I tell you is hearsay. A second student confirmed what the first said, and I know both to be honest, so I have no reason to doubt the story. What happened is this: in a biology class, discussion led the professor to comment on the advisability—I’d go so far as to say necessity—of regulating research involving human subjects.
I’m not sure what studies the professor discussed to demonstrate the importance of research ethics and regulatory oversight, but I imagine they had something to do with pharmaceuticals, given the response I am about to relate. It seems that a couple of students in the class challenged not the oversight of ethics in research with human subjects, but the ethic which that oversight seeks to maintain: that all participants should take part voluntarily and knowing the risks they will entertain along the way.
The students argued that researchers should be able to use homeless and incarcerated subjects without their knowledge or consent.

Their justification for this was precisely the ethic made famous by Mr. Spock: the good of the many outweighs the good of the few. Those people, the argument ran, were not of much use to society. Instead, their use for testing pharmaceuticals, for example, would produce benefits for everyone else. This good the many would receive from better medicines would far outweigh the benefit the homeless and incarcerated receive from their lives.
The students were not merely playing devil’s advocate, they were not simply yanking the professor’s chain (as was my initial assumption). They advocated this position sincerely, in the face of other students protesting that they could not be serious. I nearly lost my last meal.
As I stood there, however, I suddenly realized it should not have come as such a shock to me after all. These students have spent a lifetime being told that the few should be made to sacrifice on behalf of the many. If you have been told all of your life that others can require you to sacrifice for them, why would you flinch from the conclusion that you can require them to sacrifice for you? Some days you’re the few, some days they are.
It’s Kaldor-Hicks optimality: as long as there is a net gain to the group, it does not matter if some members bear more (or all) of the cost, and it is acceptable to force them to bear that cost. It’s also Kelo v. City of New London: if society can get greater returns from your life by taking it from your control and giving it to a researcher, it should. And I don’t want to hit the panic button here, but it’s eugenics: if society is gains more by transferring the resources you need to survive to someone else than you lose by dying, then society has a right to demand your life from you to improve the welfare of others.
A brief detour into externalities may help us see what is missing here. An externality, of course, is a cost (negative) or benefit (positive) that accrues to a person not party to a transaction. The fact that these costs and benefits do not factor in the transaction means that the prices in the transaction do not accurately communicate the value of that use of the resources over other uses (also known as opportunity cost). The classic example is the factory smokestack that sullies the laundry of local residents who neither produce nor consume the product in question. A more relevant example comes from a (childless) friend of mine, who is fond of declaring that children (by definition someone else’s) are a negative externality.
It occurs to me, though, that at some point the mere existence of other people creates negative externalities for me, and not solely because I am an introvert. In a world of scarcity, their consumption of any resource prevents me from consuming it, though I am not party to their actions. They drive up prices with their demand. The water they use, the air they breathe, is that much less for me (which is not irrelevant to Paul Ehrlich’s crusade for population control).
Of course, life is rarely so cleanly divided; those living around the factory often work there, or buy the product. Those children will become a positive externality when they are paying extortionate taxes to provide my friend with Social Security. The existence of other people’s demand induces more innovation and production than mine alone would. More important, however, is the insight from Ronald Coase that this drives home in a new way.
Coase points out (in “The Problem of Social Cost”) that the direction of the externality depends on the definition of the status quo ante, in other words, on the distribution of rights. Does the factory owe the homeowner compensation for the damage to the laundry, or should the homeowner pay the factory to clean its emissions? It depends on how we have defined the rights, whether to emit what you wish from your property, or to preserve your property inviolate from the emissions of others. Depending on this definition, it costs us more or less in time, effort, and money to emend this situation.
What we see, though, is that the law creates inefficiencies. At some level, we want to minimize them. There is no sense wasting more time and effort in resolving disputes than necessary. But we must still remember that some inefficiency in life is necessary. Other people have a right to exist, even where their existence imposes costs on me. We must define things so that they have a right to impose some externalities, otherwise they cannot exist. The difficulty is in defining which things are those some things, and which are things that interfere too much with my ability to exist. That is, the purpose of the law is not efficiency; in fact, it must to some degree enshrine inefficiency. We would simply like to minimize it.
We forget this distinction at our peril. The difference between Spock’s argument and the students’ lies in who makes the claim. It is a noble thing for an individual to choose to sacrifice for another, let alone for others. It is quite a different thing to require or compel that sacrifice. It is, in fact, why church and state must remain separate, why they are stronger apart than together.