Painpill makes some comments on my comments on McGrath’s arguments against arguments against the sale of non-vital organs. He(? it’s so hard to tell from the site – on the internet no one can tell and all that) agrees that the paternalistic arguments don’t look particularly plausible here, and the game-theoretic arguments look better. I agree, though I agree with Sarah that none of the extant arguments along these lines is anything like sound. Anyway, let me take this excuse to offer one other possible argument against organ sales – that all the possibilities for who should be an organ buyer are ethically untenable.

Painpill, like several of the discussants at the LSU symposium, assumes that the sales would be person-to-person. (To be fair, I didn’t do much to discourage that interpretation, but it wasn’t what I had in mind.) And he has some legitimate concerns about that possibility. But it isn’t the only way sales could happen. 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.

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.