In this thesis I describe the claims that a group of people living in rural
Scotland make about maternal surrogacy. For them, surrogacy is a topical issue
that provokes speculative ethical judgements. This is in a context in which they
are building good lives, strongly informed by environmentalist �ethical living� and
local wildlife conservation. I describe the kinds of ideas they employ and
reproduce in discussing the ethics of surrogacy to capture the nuanced
judgements that go into ethical claim-making. I argue that, in order to
understand these people�s ideas about what is natural and what is moral, they
should be considered along with their more ordinary ideas and practices. I
describe how some of the same concepts they use to talk about surrogacy
figure in their conceptions of goodness and what makes a good life, in order to
both contextualise and extend their ideas about the ethics of surrogacy.
Through ethnography of their everyday lives, I show the importance of
effort and care in the making of relationships with other people, animals and the
land and in fashioning an ethical subjectivity. I analyse the connections between
nature, kinship and ethics in lives that are structured by efforts to protect the
natural world, feel closer to other people and experience a fulfilling life. I
examine the importance of choice and money in enabling these lives and raise
questions about the location and status of transcendent values in contemporary
Britain. I discuss the temporal orientation of these people in relation to the
influence of environmentalist ideas of impending ecological crisis and consider
how this links with their ideas about how to live in the present as well as how
these connect up with their ideas about parenthood and kinship