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by anigbrowl 3319 days ago
Your argument is fallacious. You allude to indian children being held in awful conditions for organ harvesting so as to hold people emotionally hostage to your proposal, but the outcome you refer to to is not an inevitability but the result of a moral and political failure on the parts of the actors involved. You are in effect absolving them of ethical responsibility by saying they can't help it because they are powerless to resist the temptation to make all that money so we should just accept that it's going to happen unless we create a market for it.

They are not powerless to resist the ethical incentives. They are ethically corrupt and your implicitly endorsing their corrupt behavior by treating it as an inevitability that is better commercialized than eliminated.

1 comments

There's an argument about what they should do vs. what we can actually make them do. If we can make those people behave ethically, great. But if we can't? Sometimes it's easier to make bad things unprofitable and let their own lack of ethics steer them away from doing bad things.
That's fine for things like victimless crimes, but less so where the activity we're considering commercializing involves inflicting an injury on one party by removing one or more of their organs. I'll cut to the chase by saying I'm a deontologist rather than a utilitarian.

In any case, it seems far more likely that some combination of medical technologies is likely to lead to lab-grown organs before the establishment of a fleshy stock exchange.