Undervaluing your spare kidney  

Brian Weatherson responds to my response to his post on the arguments surrounding organ sales:

We could allow organ sales but ban private organ purchases, by having only the government, or maybe only the government and insurance companies, be the only legal buyers of organs. Now there are problems with such a policy, particularly in settling on how we reach a fair price, but I have no idea how this is worse than simply banning all sales. That the government would be undervaluing your spare kidney if it were offering $10,000 for them is hardly a reason to prefer a policy where it has no monetary value.

This makes sense enough. I was going at this from more of an economic perspective - right now there's a big welfare loss because those who would pay can't get to surplus organs can't consummate a legal sale. So, allowing person-to-person sales would elminate the welfare loss, but then there would be a shall we say awkward ethical situation as regards the people who couldn't afford to make a purchase. Having the government do all the purchasing seems like a good enough idea, but if there's still a shortage, there will still be a welfare loss since those who can afford to pay more than the government pays will still be unable to do so. And if the organs sales are related to life-threatening conditions, presumably there will be people willing to pay quite a lot to get their hands on an organ.

I guess the government could avoid a shortage by picking the price that would bring in exactly the right number of organs needed to fill the need; depending on how high that price was, it might or might not be worth it. You couldn't stray much from that price though, because you'd end up with either a surplus (talk about ethical problems!) or a shortage, which would still leave you with a welfare loss, essentially the same problem you had when you started.

He goes on:

But maybe this can be turned into an argument. So let me add a third possible argument against organ sales - that all proposals for who the organ buyers may be are unacceptable. Again, I have no doubt that the McGrath’s original conclusion - that none of the existing arguments in favour of a ban work - is true. But there is a third possibility for a future argument here, although given the range of possible buyers (or buyer types) that would have to be excluded there is some danger that it could not simultaneously be finite and sound.

This I find a little confusing... if the line of argument is that there are no acceptable organ buyers, how could we have that argument collapse because we've chosen to make exclusions? At any rate, I'm convinced at this point that having the government purchase the proper number of organs successfully sidesteps the problem of the wealthy having priviledged access to organs. It does still leave the issue of harvesting organs wholesale from those most willing to accept compensation - the poor.

Maybe a line of argument could focus on the sellers - after all, at any offered price, there will be some people who are willing to make a sale. But since making that sale involves grave risks to the seller (anywhere from diminished lifetime health to death from surgical complications), potential sellers are ultimately cornered by their means. There's an equity problem in there somewhere!

ALSO: There was a question as to my identity... so far I've failed on my promise to provide some easy-to-find biographical information on this site, but in the meantime this post explains that my name is Paul Goyette, and in the interests of openness I will even go so far as to confirm that I am, in fact, male.