Is Preventing “Exploitation” Important enough to Justify Killing Thousands of People?
As Virginia Postrel explains in this article, some 80,000 lives in the US alone could be saved by legalizing kidney markets. Even if you find the “exploitation” of poor people in organ markets morally repugnant, you have to ask whether following that moral intuition is so important that it justifies sacrificing all those lives. So far, I haven’t seen any argument that even comes close to showing that it is. In this context, it’s worth noting that banning kidney markets is actively killing people, not merely the lesser wrong of letting them die by refusing to help. When the US government bans organ markets, it uses the threat of force to prevent dying people from engaging in voluntary transactions to purchase what they need to survive. Those who disobey are imprisoned, as Rosenbaum probably will be. The government would obviously be guilty of active killing if it used force to prevent a starving man from buying from willing sellers the food that he needs to survive. And it could not exc
