Ethical Doubt about a Market in Live Donor Organs

Simon Rippon asks: should we be permitted to sell our unnecessary organs?

Arguments against selling parts of our bodies such as one of our kidneys are often couched in religious terms, or otherwise depend on highly questionable metaphysical or ethical assumptions, and proponents of organ markets have dismissed the arguments against permitting the sale of human organs as all of a piece - a set of attempted rationalisations of a pre-reflective and irrational feeling of repugnance. Simon Rippon outlines a more serious, humanist objection to an organ market based not on a feeling of repugnance, but on the potential for real harm to the poor that permitting an organ market could produce.

Simon Rippon is a philosopher at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics whose research interests lie mainly in the fields of bioethics, neuroethics, normative ethics, and metaethics. He wrote his Ph.D. dissertation at Harvard on the nature of morality and our ways of knowing about it. He regularly on ethical issues for the general reader at the Oxford Uehiro Centre's group blog Practical Ethics.

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