Organ Sales and Moral Distress

Journal of Applied Philosophy 23 (1):41-52 (2006)
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Abstract

abstract 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 legalisation (I consider two of those arguments: the Consequentialist Argument and the Autonomy Argument). 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 favour of legalisation, that are, in an important sense, illegitimate, and second, that even if legalisation 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.

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Author Profiles

Eduardo Rivera-López
Johannes Gutenberg Universität, Mainz
Eduardo Lopez
Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico

References found in this work

Integrity.Lynne McFall - 1987 - Ethics 98 (1):5-20.
Markets and the needy: Organ sales or aid?T. L. Zutlevics - 2001 - Journal of Applied Philosophy 18 (3):297–302.
Autonomy, constraining options, and organ sales.James Stacey Taylor - 2002 - Journal of Applied Philosophy 19 (3):273–285.

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