Add to Technorati Favorites Ideal Advice: The Self-Help Search for Truth and Balance: Kidney for Sale?

Friday, May 11, 2007

Kidney for Sale?

If times get hard, you can sell your car, your house, your belongings... However, in most countries, including the United States, you can't sell your organs. The emerging question is, should you be able to?

The justifications behind prohibiting the sale of organs are primarily ethical. It is clearly the poor, primarily in third-world countries, that would be the first to get in line.

Yet, with a burgeoning international black market, one wonders whether or not legalizing and regulating the sale of organs would better address the ethical concerns at stake.


William Saletan's solution?


"The surest way to stop him from selling his kidney is to make it worthless, by flooding the market with free organs. If you haven't filled out a donor card, do it now. Because if the dying can't get organs from the dead, they'll buy them from the living."

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I was online looking for a place to sell my kidney when Google directed me here.

While I understand the ethical concerns you raise here, I can only point to the fact that the ethical question should not be whether or not a person can sell their organs to others, but rather, why they are so self-absorbed that the idea of helping another dying human being is not enough to motivate them to action...

~Sam (not the Sam you know... ;-P)

Anonymous said...

that was not me, do i write like that?

don't think so

- the real sam

Anonymous said...

I'm not sure, but in all of existence is it possible that more than one person is named Sam?

Anonymous said...

MAP!

Unknown said...

"Sam" you gave yourself away!

Anonymous said...

Which Sam, the Sam you know or the Sam you met, which is not really named

~Sam (Really named something else...)