In Defense of Organ-legging
Posted by Thomas L. Knapp on Jul 26, 2009 in Commentary • 11 commentsCourtesy of one of New Jersey’s periodic “corruption” busts — in which politicians who don’t pass a sufficient percentage of their bribe revenues up the ladder are made examples of — the public received a rare peek into the underground market in human organs.
Writing in the New York Post, Brian Kates and William Sherman build on a Brooklyn rabbi’s arrest on “organ trafficking” charges to bemoan the fact that American patients wait three years for a kidney, “driv[ing] many to the underground market,” where they may pay in excess of $100,000 to a “broker” to procure the organ for them. This procurement process may involve bringing a poor donor from the Third World to the US, or require the patient to travel in the other direction.
What the authors don’t mention is why it takes three years for a transplant patient to get a kidney in the United States. And that reason is? If you guessed “government,” you guessed right. US law forbids compensating living organ donors, or the families of deceased donors, for the organs or for the time, trouble and pain involved in saving a life. The organ donation “establishment” even opposes giving those who agree to donate their organs “first call” at need (as proposed by the excellent organization LifeSharers.
First things first: It’s of vital importance that we understand that the state’s prohibition on organ-selling isn’t a result of logic poorly applied pursuant to some harebrained scheme that would theoretically increase the availability of organs and save lives. It’s not a good idea poorly applied — it’s just a plain bad idea.
The prohibition is a plain, bald, unapologetic application of the “ethical” holding which constitutes the root of modern statism — Kant’s “categorical imperative,” under which duty and sacrifice represent the good, and under which any benefit to the person making the sacrifice is “unethical” and taints that sacrifice.
Interestingly, this ethical constraint is applied in practice only to the person providing the organ which makes the transplant operation possible in the first place. The doctors, nurses, anesthesiologists, other hospital workers, couriers — everyone involved in the chain of events which brings an organ from donor to transplant patient — can be, and usually are, well-paid. Ditto the politicians who make the laws applying that ethical constraint to patient and donor. And, of course, the “ethicists” (be they university academics or those in hospital “lawsuit vaccination” sinecures) who demand that they be consulted on the matter.
The fact that this “ethical” prohibition costs lives apparently carries no great weight with “ethicists” or politicians. Not that that’s surprising. From their perspective, it’s not about saving lives — it’s about imposing their theories on reality and on those who inhabit reality. They consider you — your time, your money, your property, your life — expendable in that pursuit. The purpose of reality and its inhabitants, you see, is to serve their theories rather than the other way around.
Curiously, patients awaiting a transplantable organ tend to get uncooperative on this point. For some reason, they place a higher priority on remaining alive than on affirming the unearthly theories of Immanuel Kant. Thus a “black market” in organs flourishes, the best efforts of the state to suppress it notwithstanding.
The state is eager to have you regard “organ broker” Levy Rosenbaum as a “criminal.” The facts say otherwise. From the perspective of a transplant patient, who’s the crook: The entrepreneur who gets you an organ from a willing donor at an agreed-upon price, or the bureaucrat who tells you that it’s your “duty” to shut up, lie down and die for his “principles?”
Individualist anarchist great Lysander Spooner's classic critique of the U.S. Constitution: "No Treason No.6: The Constitution of No Authority" in the new and handy Pocket Subversion Edition. Also featuring Roderick T. Long's "Libertarian Anarchism: Responses to Ten Objections". 
I just imagined the concept of organ transplant insurance. The insurance company could pay healthy young people, such as myself, to be donors in the event that we die for whatever reason, and people could pay the insurance company for the service of receiving organs when they are in need.
Since there is now a profit motive, people who were previously not registered as organ donors would join up, increasing the overall availability of organs. It would also provide a profit motive for people to develop methods of growing organs outright without the need for a donor, since there would already be an established market for organs in place.
The things people could accomplish, if only they were free to do it…
As the death toll from the organ shortage mounts, public opinion will eventually support an organ market. Changes in public policy will then follow.
In the mean time, there is an already-legal way to put a big dent in the organ shortage — allocate donated organs first to people who have agreed to donate their own organs when they die. UNOS, which manages the national organ allocation system, has the power to make this simple policy change. No legislative action is required.
Americans who want to donate their organs to other registered organ donors don’t have to wait for UNOS to act. They can join LifeSharers, a non-profit network of organ donors who agree to offer their organs first to other organ donors when they die. Membership is free at http://www.lifesharers.org or by calling 1-888-ORGAN88. There is no age limit, parents can enroll their minor children, and no one is excluded due to any pre-existing medical condition.
Giving organs first to organ donors will convince more people to register as organ donors. It will also make the organ allocation system fairer. Non-donors should go to the back of the waiting list as long as there is a shortage of organs.
Stem cell research should solve this whole problem, allowing the growing of mssing tissues.
Poor Immanuel Kant! It sounds like you’ve been relying on Ayn Rand for your interpretation of his ethics. Kant never said that a benefit to the moral agent deprives his action of moral value. All he said was that a benefit to the agent makes it difficult for the agent to be certain that he’s acting for the right reason. But he wasn’t offering that as an argument for its being wrong for agents to benefit from their virtuous actions (since after all, we only have an obligation to act for the right reason, not an obligation to achieve subjective certainty that we’re acting for the right reason). On the contrary, he said that moral agents deserve to be happy.
Admittedly Kant might well be against organ donations on moral grounds. (He thought it was immoral for people to sell their hair — they were treating themselves with disrespect.) BUT he was also strongly against using the force of law to get people to be moral. So I don’t think these laws can derive much support from Kant.
Iiiiiii-manuel Kant was a real pissant,
Who was very rarely stable…
Sing along now!
Professor Long,
I’m not guite sure where I’d put the dividing line between “relying on Ayn Rand” and “agreeing with Ayn Rand.” I read some Kant (mostly, admittedly, in excerpt) before reading Rand’s opinion of him (“Kant v. Sullivan,” etc.). I’ve also read some Kant since reading Rand’s opinion of him. I may take a harder anti-Kantian line since reading Rand than I did before doing so, but I don’t think she radically altered my interpretation of his ethics. More like she affirmed and reinforced that interpretation.
If you want to leave Kant as the putative influence out, I guess we can. My assertion remains this: That the “ethicists” who oppose a market in organs demand the imposition of a purely altruistic, self-sacrificing standard on the provision of organs by those whose bodies those organs come from, even in the face of the evidence that that standard costs lives. To put a finer point on it, they’d rather see you or me die in a hospital waiting for a kidney or liver that never comes than see the provider of that kidney or liver make a buck off it.
Mike,
Wittgenstein was a burly swine
Who could drink you under the table!
“Organ-legging” Larry Niven used that term in his sci-fi books – is that where you got it?
@Scott — Actually, I retitled the piece to include “organ-legging”. The term seemed an obvious one to use in reference to bootleg organs. While I didn’t consciously borrow the term from Niven, I have likely read some of his stuff at some point as he’s a somewhat prominent science-fiction author. Assuming the earliest known published use of the term is by Niven, I’m happy to acknowledge he coined the term. it certainly wasn’t me, anyway.
BTW, the original title was a bit of a pun on the term “organ”.
Rene Decartes was a drunken fart,
“I drink therefore I am!”