The Case Against Human Organ Trafficking

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The Case Against Human Organ Trafficking

Introduction

Individuals must be not be allowed to buy and/or sell organs – their own or others’ – for financial profit. Any of the various ethical frameworks, from utilitarianism to natural-law based ethics, would seem to make it clear that a fair and just society will not allow any individual to profit financially from a surgical transfer of human tissue. This practice, made all the more possible and prevalent in the past few decades via breakthroughs in medicine such as the pharmaceutical cyclosporine (Cohen, 10), exists in different forms and procedures throughout the world. Lower socioeconomic regions of Eastern and developing countries such as India, Indonesia and China, specifically, have had to face the issue head-on: is it ethical or even legal to allow a financial exchange to accompany an organ transplant (Cohen, 10)?

As an actual life-or-death situation, the process of organ transplantation is rife with moral ethical dilemmas, even prior to the exchange of funds. At the heart of many societiesdilemma with transplants is precisely when, if ever, to consider a person medically deceased. Individuals do not easily digest the notion that a particular person is ‘dead’ in a clinical sense, i.e. brain dead, while his or her organs are still being fed blood and nutrients vital to making them viable for transplant (Zurani, 271). These questions were historically only brought to the fore amongst close family members transplants were only believed to be medically possible between close relatives, specifically twin siblings and parent/child (Zurani, 271). Now however, the process of screening and selecting a donor/recipient ‘match’ has been much simplified and streamlined. The most dubious and ethically questionable result of modern donor/recipient matching has been eerily referred to as ‘transplant tourism’ (Kim, 148), in which an individual travels to a (presumably indigent) region to purchase an organ. Several societies have adopted the euphemistic oxymoron “rewarded giving” (Ertin, 707) to skirt the issue of receiving payment for an organ. In other words, if a so-called Good Samaritan wishes to make the charitable gift of a kidney, it is fair to ‘reward’ him or her with a financial return.

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From the ethical perspective of Utilitarianism, one must act in a manner consistent with the overall happiness of all sentient beings (Tong, 10). To sell a kidney (and it is wise to limit the discussion of buying and selling organs to that of kidneys; this is not only the most widespread transplant-for-pay procedure, it has also become fairly common knowledge that the kidneys are redundant organs and one can live a continued healthy life after losing a single kidney) is a major surgery. It is not a far logical jump to assume that one would not volunteer for major surgery and its associated risks ...

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