Adumbration

Not every scarce thing is valuable to lots of people, or even to a few people. Setting aside lifeboat situations and the like, our individual time in this life is unique in being both extremely scarce and generally non-transferable.  This note aims to raise a question concerning how that might change.

Enough obtuse introduction - what sparked this entry was the recent episode on Planet Money concerned with how we decide who gets lungs.  Usually not a question most of us have to face, but for some it is life altering.  And not just lungs, of course; if your body is failing in one way or another, continuation of your time in this world may depend on getting a transplant of one or another organ.  The episode discussed the current practices, which mostly deal with committees of one form or another, exercising more or less objective criteria aimed at allocating the extremely scarce resource of extra organs to people who are terminally ill.  What bugged me about this episode was the explicit exclusion of any discussion of markets in such goods.

Maybe not surprising, it is against the law to sell ones body parts.  In case it is not clear from my other entries, I'm not talking about selling under duress as one might in the face of a violent criminal; that condition falls under the general rubrik proscribing force and fraud as acceptable modes of human interaction.  I'm writing here about the considered decisions of a consenting adult, taking whatever council she sees fit, to offer for sale to another consenting adult, any part of their physical body.

Why should this be?  I think it is time that our culture start to acknowledge that people in the the last couple decades have brought us vastly improved technology that has made possible transplants of many of our organs.  With that capability comes the potential to improve the lives of countless of our friends, neighbors, family members, and even ourselves.  So why should these benefits still be literally priceless?

Putting a price on our bodies does not cheapen us.