Putting a price on human organs
Canadian broadcasting reports that University of Calgary researchers suggest paying kidney donors could be “less costly, more effective” and payments could boost donations. Is this a good idea and if not, why?
First, we must never underestimate the suffering and anguish of the people on a waiting list for a kidney transplant and of their families, and we have obligations to do what we can to help them. Payment might increase the supply of organs, so must be considered.
A favourable economic cost/benefit assessment, such as the Calgary researchers report, is not alone, however, sufficient to justify paying donors. As American physician-ethicist Daniel Sulmasy says, “Cost-effectiveness assessment (CEA) is not a morally neutral way to make … decisions. It is not rationality itself. Rather, it represents a particular view about the rational that prizes efficiency over fidelity and outcome over process. It assumes one can commensurate everything that human beings value in monetary terms. … A critic of CEA might very well believe … that other things in addition to the net cost-effectiveness ratio ought to be considered to determine the right and just decision.”
Michael Sandel, the Bass Professor of Government at Harvard University, in his book, What Money Can’t Buy, explains what some of these “other things” could be.
Sandel warns that we must consider the dangers in taking market reasoning beyond its application to material goods. Applying market reasoning to procuring organs and, thereby, allowing them to be bought and sold would corrupt a societal good – the act, itself, of the gift of an organ – and eliminate an altruistic activity – the altruism involved in unpaid organ donation.
Moreover, selling parts of the human body devalues human beings, and both reflects and causes a loss of respect for the individuals whose organs are sold, and for human beings, in general. We prohibit slavery, where the whole person becomes just a commodity which/who can be bought and sold, or selling a child, for just these reasons.
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