Here are some points:
- It's much, much, easier to coerce someone into doing something they don't want to do when it's a legal option than when it's illegal in all circumstances.
- People in desperate situations are among the least likely to make their decisions rationally, so they might take the option even if they would have found a better one otherwise.
- It lowers the threshold of how bad things can get. Right now, if you have no money, you're in a shitty situation. With that "option", I expect a common outcome is that you take it, have a bunch of health complications and/or die, don't get compensated very well (there's a large supply of poor people like you and you're desperate, so your bargaining position is weak), and end up in an even worse situation.
- Nobody said "instead of", but there is a limited amount of attention and resources directed at getting better laws passed, and this one is extremely far down on my list of priorities.
But setting up a system where this is an option, leads to a society where those people might not have the option of not submitting to experimentation.
E.G: I was watching an episode on kidney trade (Netflix TV show The Traffickers) and a man was duped into selling his kidney. He expected more but only received less than $300. There might have been complications with his operation because now he has pain that he will have to deal with his entire life. I'm not sure if he actually understood the risk of this entire thing. And he has also been ostracized from his community. This system of organ trade, even though it is illegal, has become so bad that it's like a human pyramid scheme. They recruit one person to sell their kidney and every time that person gets someone else to sell a kidney, they take a cut. Pretty terrible stuff.
> I was watching an episode on kidney trade (Netflix TV show The Traffickers) and a man was duped into selling his kidney. He expected more but only received less than $300.
That's just fraud. A man was deceived. We have laws for dealing with that.
> There might have been complications with his operation because now he has pain that he will have to deal with his entire life. I'm not sure if he actually understood the risk of this entire thing.
Exactly the sorts of issues that bringing such a market out from underground would resolve.
> And he has also been ostracized from his community
That doesn't even make sense, and if it's true, then it says more about the community than it does kidney markets.
> . This system of organ trade, even though it is illegal, has become so bad that it's like a human pyramid scheme. They recruit one person to sell their kidney and every time that person gets someone else to sell a kidney, they take a cut. Pretty terrible stuff.
Is it more terrible than any other pyramid scheme? If you think there's fraud or deception going on, sure that's terrible. But giving people the right to sell themselves is not inherently terrible.
Here, read this: https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/07/31/need-a-kidn...
The U.S. government keeps trying to force people in poverty to make harder decisions to be able to use the safety net. Is it so hard to imagine that someday one of the requirements would be subjecting yourself to experimental tests?
Those are just two ideas off the top of my head. I'm not a fan of slippery slope arguments, but this does seem like a Pandora's box worth looking very carefully at before opening.
Meanwhile, unemployed people risk losing their benefits if they refuse a job offer. So depending on how these jobs are treated, an employment agency might put you in a position where you may not be able to refuse.
https://employment.findlaw.com/losing-a-job/refuse-job-offer...
To approach it another way, as long as one group of people has an economic benefit from abusing another group, there’s a problem. There’s no way you can ever be certain enough that such a system is being administered fairly and competently. The bureaucratic and ethical abuses and mistakes we get already are bad enough.
Finally, I f anyone is in such a desperate situation that this looks like a good option, then surely there must be other ethical options available for society to intervene?
Why? Why shouldn't these people be free to make that choice for themselves?
> To approach it another way, as long as one group of people has an economic benefit from abusing another group, there’s a problem.
How, exactly, are you defining 'abuse'? Is it abuse to offer someone money to do something? It's hard to see how it could be abusive to give someone an option that they didn't previously have.
There is now an incentive for the people who control the system to reduce the level of social assistance, because in so doing they increase the number of people who "voluntarily" submit to risky experimentation.
This proposal seems like adding a new option on an individual level, but on a social level it paradoxically leads to a situation where that group has less choice.
It's like playing the game of chicken on a road where the first person to swerve from a head-on collision loses. Paradoxically the winning move is to visibly remove your own choice by throwing your steering wheel out the window.
More choice is not always better.
That's quite the logical leap there. And is one that could be made about literally any effort to help the poor, so, i'm not quite sure you've made your point.
It's a nice concept, but ethics (and the idea of politeness) are largely relativistic to the interpreter/actor. Even with the idea of normative ethics being dictated by culture and point-of-view out of the way, there are layers to every ethical/moral choice within each doctrine of thought.
Ask people around the world about the ethical treatment of animals, prisoners of war, children, spouses -- you'll get different answers from every individual, with strong weights towards certain behaviors dictated by regional culture and upbringing/experience.
tl;dr : I may think that it's being polite not to spit on me for being a member of a lower caste. YOU might think i'm being polite for opening the door for someone behind me.
Neither opinion is wrong, it's framed by the culture and the person.
In modern developed society it should never be the case that a person's best economic choice is to sell their health and life for money. It's just not necessary for people to be in that position unless someone wants them to be in that position. Why would anyone want that?
What's the motivation for crating those conditions, and if people do want to put people in that position, how can the rest of us trust that the safeguards someone who would want that would put in place are sufficient and robust?
So, you think the situation they're in now, where they don't have this option, is preferable to the one where they do have this option? Nobody said anything about 'instead of', either.
The point is: unless you have a perfectly egalitarian society, some people will have more stuff and other people will have less. Jobs offering stuff are, inherently, more attractive to those who currently have less stuff. There is nothing wrong about that, in fact, that's the mechanism by which people with less stuff acquire more stuff. Why, exactly, do you believe they shouldn't be able to make that choice for themselves?