Defending the indefensible

[Leoreth]

New hypothetical for you "legalizing the kidney market" people. What if those both literally and figuratively poor people who are prohibited from selling their kidneys could also sell their whole body? Not dead of course, but living. They could sell themselves into slavery.

I mean, how bad could that be? Things will all be balanced out by the "slave market", and it's their own choice after all, plus the rich need some menials to do their work, so it works out great for everyone.

Because, I tell you, every one who's ready to sell his own kidney for their naked survival is already someone's slave in everything but name.

 

[Traitorfish]

Are there not still countries where the majority of people don't own their own land?

"All of them"?

 

[IglooDame]

Sorry for the but I lost track of the thread earlier and am still a bit surprised at the visceral reactions here.

To my mind, there is a spectrum of "control/ownership of one's own body". The spectrum includes points like consent to assault (S&M), legalized consumption of various drugs (caffeine, nicotine, alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, etc etc etc), legalized prostitution, "right to suicide", assisted suicide, selling blood, selling organs, and indentured service/"contractual slavery". Some of these are supported/defended by the majority of people here as social liberties/civil rights, and some of them clearly don't have majority support, but to my mind support or objections to one tend to apply to the rest.

Which leaves me curious. How much would you sell your kidney for, assuming you currently have two healthy ones, and assuming the cost of the surgery/recovery is not coming out of your pocket, and assuming there's no long-term shortening of lifespan (as studies now show is the case)?

Me, I'd find about $50K net (i.e. after taxes) tempting, and would almost certainly go for it for $100K net.

 

[Leoreth]

No amount of money could repay me for a likely shorter lifespan.

 

[IglooDame]

No amount of money could repay me for a likely shorter lifespan.

How much shorter?

Edit: I googled to confirm my own understanding. Doesn't shorten one's lifespan.

Edit2: JAMA concurs with the NEJM

 

[Wolfbeckett]

I haven't done extensive research. If it shortens my average life by 5 years, I'd be tempted in the $50-$100k range. 10 years or more and I'd be unlikely to do it all. If it doesn't shorten my average life at all then I could go as low as $10k and call that fair (not that I wouldn't try to haggle for more of course).

 

[Traitorfish]

I haven't done extensive research. If it shortens my average life by 5 years, I'd be tempted in the $50-$100k range.

And yet you wouldn't be willing to spend five years working as somebody's full-time slave for less than two dollars per hour. So that's weird.

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

What about high-paying corporate jobs that require massive overtime and high levels of stress? Those lead to heart attacks and suicide. Aren't those exploitative as well? Shouldn't we protect people from them?

We sure should. What about taxing the hell out of those high paying jobs? The solution then becomes splitting the responsibilities into smaller jobs, which are now no longer high-paying, less stressful and as a bonus it provides a lot of jobs.

 

[Wolfbeckett]

And yet you wouldn't be willing to spend five years working as somebody's full-time slave for less than two dollars per hour. So that's weird.

That's because those years spent working are more valuable, being in the prime of life, whereas life expectancy reduction costs the LEAST valuable years of your life, AKA the Depends/Alzheimer's years.

 

[El_Machinae]

Which leaves me curious. How much would you sell your kidney for, assuming you currently have two healthy ones, and assuming the cost of the surgery/recovery is not coming out of your pocket, and assuming there's no long-term shortening of lifespan (as studies now show is the case)?

The moral decision of whether we should donate a kidney freely seems obvious, yes, unless it's going to hurt your long-term earning power (because then you'll have less to donate to charity, etc.). But, I'm unlikely to do the donation, because I'm not as good as I'd like to be (too cowardly, too selfish).

How much I'd want for my kidney? I just cannot imagine. My life would not be materially improved by $50,000 or $100,000. Best metrics would be regarding retirement, and $100k would only buy me a couple of years closer to retirement. If, otoh, you offered me $1 million for my kidney, I'd easily say yes (that's enough to sustainably boost my lifestyle as well as contributing to my retirement). So, my price-point is somewhere in there.

 

[Mark1031]

Sorry for the but I lost track of the thread earlier and am still a bit surprised at the visceral reactions here.

To my mind, there is a spectrum of "control/ownership of one's own body". The spectrum includes points like consent to assault (S&M), legalized consumption of various drugs (caffeine, nicotine, alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, etc etc etc), legalized prostitution, "right to suicide", assisted suicide, selling blood, selling organs, and indentured service/"contractual slavery". Some of these are supported/defended by the majority of people here as social liberties/civil rights, and some of them clearly don't have majority support, but to my mind support or objections to one tend to apply to the rest.

Which leaves me curious. How much would you sell your kidney for, assuming you currently have two healthy ones, and assuming the cost of the surgery/recovery is not coming out of your pocket, and assuming there's no long-term shortening of lifespan (as studies now show is the case)?

Me, I'd find about $50K net (i.e. after taxes) tempting, and would almost certainly go for it for $100K net.

To understand this distinction you need to have an appreciation for the idea of exploitation in general and economic exploitation in particular. The idea that people are simply commodities, free or not, is simply revolting to many people in the current age, although it was the standard in the past. If you take your various examples I think the most popular would be the ones that benefit specifically the individual alone. Assisted suicide for terminal individuals in great pain, S&M, certain drugs, all bring pleasure to the individual or at least that is a primary goal. All have the potential to be exploitive eg through profit from addiction and I think that profit motive should be removed to reduce the potential for exploitation.
The next category would be things like prostitution and you could include other dangerous or undesirable jobs. Clearly there is economic exploitation in these areas but most things like mining provide a societal benefit and we try to mitigate the danger and exploitation through labor and safety laws. The whole history of modern capitalism is trying to mitigate this exploitation. You could argue about a societal benefit for prostitution but the biggest problems arise from it being illegal and the cost benefit of trying to stop it makes it not worthwhile.
Slavery and organ harvesting are the most exploitive and most people can see what would happen if they were legal. You wouldn’t get 100K for a kidney, the market rate would be on the order of 5K or less and they would be coming from the most desperately poor people in the world. While statistically safe it is abdominal surgery that will have many risks like anesthesia reaction, infection, pain. Thankfully most people seem to draw the line at this level of human exploitation.
For most things in life we can’t just apply some hard and fast rule but make judgments along a spectrum. I like sex with attractive women but I draw the line at sex with my sister. Call me inconsistent but that’s life.

 

[Bootstoots]

I probably wouldn't do it for any price unless I really needed the money - I don't really aspire to have lots of money, so if I was already living comfortably I'd keep my kidney. In case I was really broke, I'd say $100k or so would be a good price. Possibly $50k, depending on how dire my circumstances are.

 

[Bootstoots]

Slavery and organ harvesting are the most exploitive and most people can see what would happen if they were legal. You wouldn’t get 100K for a kidney, the market rate would be on the order of 5K or less and they would be coming from the most desperately poor people in the world. While statistically safe it is abdominal surgery that will have many risks like anesthesia reaction, infection, pain. Thankfully most people seem to draw the line at this level of human exploitation.
For most things in life we can’t just apply some hard and fast rule but make judgments along a spectrum. I like sex with attractive women but I draw the line at sex with my sister. Call me inconsistent but that’s life.

Why do you put slavery and organ harvesting on the same level? One involves giving over your entire life to a master, the other involves a medical procedure with a fairly small amount of risk.

I can understand opposing free trade in organs if you support having the same level of basic healthcare for all. But how about, say, a scheme where governments compensate people for donating kidneys to people on the waiting list, given that they're in desperately short supply? It seems that would just save lives and give money to poor people who could really use it. Even $5k could go a long way for someone who's desperately poor, especially in a foreign country.

I suggested that the government buy kidneys earlier in the thread to see what anti-kidney sales people would say, but nobody responded because they were too busy grinding ideological axes with libertarians.

 

[Wolfbeckett]

Basically at my current rather frugal living conditions $100K net could sustain me for 5-7 years depending on inflation without having to work, that would mean I could quit my mind numbing crap job and focus full time on trying to do something else that I want to do, like be a writer or a music journalist or something. 5-7 years of no-worries time this early in my life would be a sweet deal frankly if I didn't waste it and I would definitely trade 5 years off of my end life in exchange for that.

Now if the market value was closer to $5k, screw that, I'll keep my kidney thanks.

 

[Alassius]

But in this case, you're bringing the potential for aggression into the equation. You would agree that not giving someone my kidney is a passive act, right? But if I hold a knife to someone's throat and threaten to kill them, I have committed an aggressive act. There is an important distinction between the two when discussing voluntary contracts.

Free market works because when people are given one option that is good for them, and another that is bad, they'd hopefully pick the former. Those that provide good options went on to thrive. Those providing bad options quit because nobody chooses them. Not everything that happens in a market is good, even an ideal market. In the ideal market, everyone would have a better option, so selling kidney would be eliminated as the bad option, improving the market as a whole. In the real world, however, when the poor do not have the better option, this mechanism stops working.

When the options are between bad and worse, the choice being voluntary doesn't by itself make life better. The person making the choice gets punished either way. The provider of bad choice gets rewarded. This causes a vicious cycle. Take pawn shop as an example. Pawning is never a fair trade on the face value of the item. You trade the illiquid asset for an amount of liquid cash less than the item's worth. Each time you pawn, the net worth of your belongings is reduced, so pawning accelerates your descend into poverty if you already can't support yourself. When you get poorer, you are more desperate for cash, and you are more likely to accept a lower offer when you pawn. On the other hand, when the pawnbroker gets richer, he will have a better financial security so that he can push down the price further, being able to afford the risk that you won't sell.

Selling kidney is similar in that it's an option that typically makes your life worse. Most importantly, you can only do it once, so when you do it you're probably quite desperate, and cannot bargain for a good price. Working in coal mines or as a prostitute both carry hardship and risk of diseases, but if you can survive, you have a chance of saving enough money to truly improve your life, as opposed to getting over just one obstacle.

 

[IglooDame]

To understand this distinction you need to have an appreciation for the idea of exploitation in general and economic exploitation in particular. The idea that people are simply commodities, free or not, is simply revolting to many people in the current age, although it was the standard in the past. If you take your various examples I think the most popular would be the ones that benefit specifically the individual alone. Assisted suicide for terminal individuals in great pain, S&M, certain drugs, all bring pleasure to the individual or at least that is a primary goal. All have the potential to be exploitive eg through profit from addiction and I think that profit motive should be removed to reduce the potential for exploitation.
The next category would be things like prostitution and you could include other dangerous or undesirable jobs. Clearly there is economic exploitation in these areas but most things like mining provide a societal benefit and we try to mitigate the danger and exploitation through labor and safety laws. The whole history of modern capitalism is trying to mitigate this exploitation. You could argue about a societal benefit for prostitution but the biggest problems arise from it being illegal and the cost benefit of trying to stop it makes it not worthwhile.
Slavery and organ harvesting are the most exploitive and most people can see what would happen if they were legal. You wouldn’t get 100K for a kidney, the market rate would be on the order of 5K or less and they would be coming from the most desperately poor people in the world. While statistically safe it is abdominal surgery that will have many risks like anesthesia reaction, infection, pain. Thankfully most people seem to draw the line at this level of human exploitation.
For most things in life we can’t just apply some hard and fast rule but make judgments along a spectrum. I like sex with attractive women but I draw the line at sex with my sister. Call me inconsistent but that’s life.

I'm making an attempt to avoid quote-warring, so please excuse the disorganization of my response. It is true, people are not commodities, but one simply cannot avoid that lives have price tags when it comes to risk assessment and actuarial tables.

And you say "while statistically safe, it is abdominal surgery that will have many risks..." In my second link, the following: "Researchers from Johns Hopkins University looked at all of the 80,347 living kidney donations in the U.S. between 1994 and 2009. They found that, in the first 90 days after surgery, 3.1 of every 10,000 kidney donors died. Although this mortality rate was about eight times higher than non-donors experience, it is relatively low compared to similar surgical procedures."

Where do you get your 5K market value? Pulled out of your... gut? If people are currently committing murders to harvest organs (the urban legends about waking up in a tub full of ice minus one kidney are myths, right?) presumably rich people with kidney disease are paying lots of money to murderous surgeons. Clearly there's a market there. And if "the biggest problems arise from it being illegal" for prostitution, I suspect that the same is true for selling organs. If rich people can get live-donor kidneys via a larger supply due to people simply selling them, then no more murders to obtain them, right?

And the example of judgement along a spectrum is not really a good example, unless your sister is not a very attractive woman. But I do get the 'shades of gray' point.

 

[IglooDame]

Selling kidney is similar in that it's an option that typically makes your life worse.

It "typically" has no effect on your life.

 

[Alassius]

It "typically" has no effect on your life.

I meant more than health effects. Specifically that if you have to sell it in a short time, which is probably why you have to sell something valuable, you're unlikely to get "market value", ie, what the rich people are truly willing to pay.

 

[Mark1031]

Where do you get your 5K market value? Pulled out of your... gut? If people are currently committing murders to harvest organs (the urban legends about waking up in a tub full of ice minus one kidney are myths, right?) presumably rich people with kidney disease are paying lots of money to murderous surgeons. Clearly there's a market there. And if "the biggest problems arise from it being illegal" for prostitution, I suspect that the same is true for selling organs. If rich people can get live-donor kidneys via a larger supply due to people simply selling them, then no more murders to obtain them, right?

A Chinese teenager was so desperate to acquire the new iPad 2 that he sold one of his kidneys for just £2,000 to pay for it, according to reports.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/8552195/Chinese-teen-sells-his-kidney-for-an-iPad-2.html

£2,000=$3198 at todays exchange rate. I over estimated. Now if the practice was legitimate world wide what do you think the price would be? More interestingly do you think it matters? What if I fly the kid (assume 18 or over) to the US and provide a weeks stay at disneyland all meals and park entrance included during his recuperation from the surgery would this be a problem? Do you think I couldn’t find any takers on the free market? This is the reality of what we are talking about.

I do not understand the murder argument, is that a joke?