Whoa, wait, you lost me there. What’s “intrinsically wrong” with two adults who haven’t made any exclusive commitments to anyone else exchanging money for sex? If you’re willing to question social norms for the one behavior, why not the other?

I disagree. Perhaps I’m too pessimistic, but it seems far more likely that as the death toll from organ shortage follows, public opinion will shift to a “presumed consent”-type regime, and then ultimately end up supporting the mandatory donation of organs from all non-disease-bearing corpses.

And my point was just that organ transfer, unlike illicit sex between unmarried adults, doesn’t have anything intrinsically wrong with it, and so it seems to me that we need a good reason to think that the introduction of money changes its moral character in the way that our society seems to assume it does.

Okay, so the sex parallel is probably not the best (not least because my post above leads to the rather preposterous question of whether it is immoral to pay your own spouse to have sex with you). How about something like spanking your child? I presume that the majority of people in this country still consider it permissible and morally licit for a parent to spank his child. But to do it for money? It seems to me that the introduction of money in that scenario pretty clearly makes it wrong (and also something that should be prohibited by law).

And I think our society has been clear on this issue – selling your body or your body parts, whatever the intention or the outcome, is almost always viewed as immoral.

Well, perhaps our society has been clear on that – though society can, of course, be wrong. And my point was just that organ transfer, unlike illicit sex between unmarried adults, doesn’t have anything intrinsically wrong with it, and so it seems to me that we need a good reason to think that the introduction of money changes its moral character in the way that our society seems to assume it does.

Thanks for the clarification Petellius.

But to the claim that there should be limits to what people can do for money, doesn’t it matter whether the activities in question are immoral ones or not?

And I think our society has been clear on this issue – selling your body or your body parts, whatever the intention or the outcome, is almost always viewed as immoral.

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.

As to people who need kidneys and can afford to buy them, presumably all of them can afford to cross state lines. So what is the practical effect of a local ban?

That certainly doesn’t seem obvious to me. But in any case the point of a statewide ban would be perfectly parallel to the one you ascribe to speed limits: not primarily to keep organ donors from being compensated “in general”, but rather to prevent such compensation from taking place among a certain range of businesses. It makes perfect sense for a state (or town, or country) to prohibit a practice from taking place within its boundaries even if it knows that it will still take place (and perhaps will take place more frequently) elsewhere; I don’t see anything impractical about that at all.