Organ Sales and Moral Distress

EDUARDO RIVERA LÓPEZ

Journal of Applied Philosophy

Blackwell

Año: 2006 vol. 23 p. 41 - 52

0264-3758

The possibility that organ sales by living adults might be made legal is morally distressing to many of us. However, powerful arguments have been provided recently supporting legalization. Is our instinctive reaction against a market of organs irrational then? The aim of this paper is not to prove that legalization would be immoral, all things considered, but rather to show, first, that there are some kinds of arguments, offered in favor of legalization, that are, in an important sense, illegitimate, and second, that even if legalization might not be wrong all things considered, there are good reasons for our negative moral intuitions. Moreover, identifying these reasons will help highlight some features of moral decisions in non-ideal situations, which in turn might be relevant to some other moral or policy choices. I consider two arguments favoring legalization: the Consequentialist  Argument and the Autonomy Argument. I concede that they could be successfully provided by an external observer. The problem arises when participants of an unjust society try to found the legalization of organ sales on them.