This essay develops a framework for thinking about the moral basis for the commodification of human reproductive materials. It argues that selling and buying gametes and genes is morally acceptable although there should not be a market for zygotes, embryos, or genomes. Also a market in gametes and genes should be regulated in order to address concerns about the adverse social consequences of commodification.

This paper examines the ethical difficulties of organ donation from living donors and the problem of causing harm to patients or research subjects at their request. Graham Greene explored morally similar questions in his novella, The Tenth Man.

Bioethical arguments conceal the coercion underlying the choice between poverty and selling ones organsIn mid-May 2006, three Palestinian prisoners detained in Israel applied to the Israeli Prison Service for permission to sell their kidneys in order to send money to their children for food. Whether truly sincere or merely propagandistic, the request was made against the background of Israel’s decision to suspend the transfer of Palestinian tax moneys to the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority, and the subsequent increasing poverty and famine in (...) the Gaza Strip.1An official decision was yet to be made when this paper was written. However, the IPS chief medical officer had already made it clear that the request is likely to be rejected. Aside from emphasising that the cost of the pertinent treatment of the prisoners could not be imposed on the IPS, especially as it would greatly exceed the sum to be obtained by the sellers , he asserted that the IPS “won’t lend a hand to endangering the prisoner”. He also reiterated the official IPS policy, according to which the prisoners’ consent to such transaction could not be valid, since they might have been threatened by people from inside or outside the prison.1This is ironic. While the IPS’ professed concerns for the welfare and best interests of the prisoners are commendable, they conceal and hence reaffirm the real coercion implicit in the dilemma the prisoners face: to sell their kidney or let their children starve. Interestingly, approval of their request would have equally concealed the coercion, this time behind concerns for either their autonomy, or the welfare of their children, or both.At present, it is unlikely that Israel will acknowledge the role of national oppression and poverty in producing this dilemma. Rather, the debate will remain focused on …. (shrink)

BackgroundThe increasing debate on financial incentives for organ donation raises concerns about a "commodification of the human body". Philosophical-ethical stances on this development depend on assumptions concerning the body and how people think about it. In our qualitative empirical study we analyze public attitudes towards organ donation in their specific relation to conceptions of the human body in four European countries (Cyprus, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden). This approach aims at a more context-sensitive picture of what "commodification of the body" (...) can mean in concrete clinical decisions concerning organ donation.ResultsWe find that moral intuitions concerning organ donation are rooted in various conceptions of the human body and its relation to the self: a) the body as a mechanical object owned by the self, b) the body as a part of a higher order embodying the self, and c) the body as a hierarchy of organs constitutive of the self.ConclusionThe language of commodification is much too simple to capture what is at stake in everyday life intuitions about organ donation and organ sale. We discuss how the plurality of underlying body-self conceptions can be taken into account in the ethical debate, pointing out consequences for an anthropologically informed approach and for a liberal perspective. (shrink)

The paper argues that the idea of gift-giving and its associated imagery, which has been founding the ethics of organ transplants since the time of the first successful transplants, should be abandoned because it cannot effectively block arguments for (regulated) markets in human body parts. The imagery suggests that human bodies or their parts are transferable objects which belong to individuals. Such imagery is, however, neither a self-evident nor anthropologically unproblematic construal of the relation between a human being and their (...) body. The paper proposes an alternative conceptualization of that relation, the identity view according to which a human being is identical with their living body. This view, which offers a new ethical perspective on some central concepts of transplant medicine and its ethical and legal standards and institutions, supports widely shared intuitive ethical judgments. On this proposal, an act of selling a human body or one of its parts is an act of trade in human beings, not in owned objects. Transfers of human body parts for treatment purposes are to be seen as sharing in another human being’s misfortune rather than as giving owned objects. From the perspective of policy-making, the proposal requires, first, that informed consent for removal of transplant material be obtained from the potential benefactor. Secondly, explicit consent by the prospective benefactor is obligatory in the case of removal of transplant material from a living benefactor. Thirdly, in the case of posthumous retrieval, informed consent by the potential benefactor during their life is not ethically indispensable. Additionally, while refusal of posthumous retrieval expressed by a potential benefactor during their life must be respected, such a refusal needs ethical justification and explanation. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to analyze the way in which Edmund Husserl deals with the problem of the constitution of image in his writings. The difference between a common thing and a work of art lies in the fact that the ‘thing’ is submitted as an object to perception, while the work of art is the product of the human capacity called imagination or fantasy (Phantasie). Therefore, the difference between perception (which is an objectifying act) and imagination (which (...) refers to a mental representation) is the fundamental difference Husserl operates with in his analysis of the phenomenological problem of the image building. I also want to show that Husserl’s analysis of the constitution of the image is fundamental in the understanding of the work of art (aesthetic phenomena including) and of its difference from a common thing. From the point of view of the History of Philosophy, the Husserlian analysis presupposes the overcoming of the classical opposition between subject and object, and the aesthetic experience is one of the (privileged) ways through which this overcoming can be achieved. (shrink)