> If a spouse wanted to sell their organs to improve the life of the remainder of their family, and made the choice with sound mind, then absolutely.

The thing is, nobody of sound mind who has a choice (and I mean a real choice, not "give us your organs or your family starves") would choose to do this.

Nobody wants to sell their organs. People that want to purchase organs would love your suggestion however, as it allows them to justify exploitation of the desperate under the guise of "it was their decision".

Freedom of destiny indeed.

> Nobody wants to sell their organs. People that want to purchase organs would love your suggestion however, as it allows them to justify exploitation of the desperate under the guise of "it was their decision".

The problem is that almost any labor is unethical under certain systems. We just notice it more when it's in the extremes, like sex-work or selling an organ.

If we didn't have a situation where people could be taken such advantage of, this wouldn't be a problem. The cost of buying an organ might be very high, because no one would be forced into it.

But yes, if suddenly selling organs were legal in the US, that would be a very unfortunate thing because it would immediately be abused.

Freedom must include the freedom to make mistakes, as well as the freedom to make choises you don't understand.

Otherwise some entity will "keep you safe from yourself".

Genuinely asking. Do you then think we should drop age restrictions on tobacco and alcohol sales?

I don't know. Societies globally agree that human babies are born prematurely and take some 16..18+ years to mature enough to take care of themselves. As an anecdote I've had both tobacco and alcohol before the legal age. Never really liked either.

My context was adults. Of course babies mustn't have the right to operate heavy machinery unsupervised, among many other things. But once society declares a person fully grown, they should have all the rights.

I'm a bit of an individualist. I understand why society, like an ant hive, would like to control some/many aspects of its constituents. But I also think that freedom isn't a mere cost, but is actually a portal to a better world overall.

Children aren't biologically capable of making sound decisions about their destiny[1]. If anything, the age could be raised.

[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3621648/

I'm not sure how many children you've known. There is a huge disparity in how wise they are just as is the case with adults. I'm not sure I see the philosophical consistency of telling a sharp youth who wants to smoke that they can't while letting an unsavy adult get talked into giving up their left lung.

There are multiple documented instances of life insurance fraud for exactly this purpose.

> > I don't know, do you think the world would be better if people could sell their organs?

> Freedom of destiny. If a spouse wanted to sell their organs to improve the life of the remainder of their family, and made the choice with sound mind, then absolutely.

How is that world better than this one ?

With all the resources we have in the world, why don't we strive to allow for people to have better options than organ selling ?

That's a false dichotomy. Both of those worlds could exist simultaneously. I gave examples, thought experiments.

If someone is willing to cut off their arm for sale as food, should other people be allowed to buy it?

This is probably a reasonable medium term comparison to selling organs (where using someone else's flesh will become an aesthetic choice more than a necessity or the medically superior option).

> If someone is willing to cut off their arm for sale as food, should other people be allowed to buy it?

What's the argument against allowing this? That it's distasteful?

Edit: pun not intended, but noticed immediately and preserved.

It's directly harmful to society to make it rewarding for people to mutilate themselves.

Advertising, alcohol, tobacco, meat production, online gambling, excessive daily gaming are all net harmful and yet here we are.

Just because something is (considered) harmful to society doesn’t mean that it is right of the government to use monopoly of violence to prevent individuals from it. Some things, of course, but it is not sufficient.

Lest you’re looking at a moralizing authoritarian government as a good thing.

An economic argument might be that a person buying an arm must be able to make better use of it than a person selling an arm (e.g. the buyer can pay the seller enough to incentivize it), so therefore it is more productive to society to allow the transaction.

It doesn't follow that when two individuals are incentivized to transact with one another, that that transaction has a net positive impact on wider society; there may be negative externalities. Additionally, people are not always completely rational and perfectly informed agents, which means that not all voluntary transactions do render positive value to them. Selling your arm is vanishingly unlikely to be an efficient use of resources, particularly as arms are not fungible (you cannot change your mind later and reacquire an arm). An arm is just much more valuable when attached to a person, and if the economic incentives point the other way, we should probably look for how such a perverse situation came about, rather than fire up our circular saws.

Yeah, this is the argument for bitcoin, that if the transaction occurs then it must make sense for society.

I'll play devils' advocate here. Why is this harmful?

Say you're a middle class gentleman, rich but humane cannibals offer you 5 million dollars if they can have a surgeon remove your arm, so they can eat it.

Losing and arm will be tough, without that $5 mill it'd be very tough, especially to keep work. Since you're rich you're not going on disability or anything, so really it's self-sustained.

The only person out anything is the person who lost the arm. How is this harmful to society?

I'm not certain it is, I'm not saying it's right either... I mean obvious it's not normal, but is it really "harmful"?

This extremely unlikely situation hinges on profound wealth inequality. Only someone staggeringly, fantastically, mind-bogglingly rich (and also completely nuts) would blow 5 million on eating a human arm. And only someone who is really struggling in life would contemplate such a huge sacrifice for mere money. Since the actual variation in human ability, and therefore economic potential, follows a tame bell curve as opposed to the radically skewed distribution of wealth that this scenario requires (and that we actually see), this represents a market inefficiency. If we permit this transaction to take place, the economic potential of the formerly-armed takes a huge hit, while Cannibal Jeff Bezos does not enjoy a corresponding gain. Thus not only is the transaction negative-sum, but the inequality (and hence the inefficiency) is exacerbated.

Because it's fucking weird? Sorry but we live in a civil society that shouldn't encourage this kind of stuff. At what point do these arguments become so reductive as to have little to no substance?

Well, I certainly wouldn't do it, nor would I endorse it. But I don't think the government should imprison people for doing things that random people on the internet consider weird.

This is exactly what I mean.

I (probably) wouldn't go for assisted suicide, but I have no right to demand someone else suffer because of my own insecurities about death.

I (probably) wouldn't even volunteer my spare kidney, but I have no right to say that a 70y parent can't give their heart to their dying 30y.

Freedom of destiny wouldn't be the only freedom that allows societal problems, but freedom is not the cause: inequality and power are.