title: Kidney sales and the analogy with dangerous employment.
abstract: Proponents of permitting living kidney sales often argue as follows. Many jobs involve significant risks; people are and should be free to take these risks in exchange for money; the risks involved in giving up a kidney are no greater than the risks involved in acceptable hazardous jobs; so people should be free to give up a kidney for money, too. This paper examines this frequently invoked but rarely analysed analogy. Two objections are raised. First, it is far from clear that kidney sales and dangerous jobs involve comparable risks on an appropriately broad comparison. Second, and more importantly, even if they do involve comparable risks it does not follow that kidney sales must be permitted because dangerous jobs are. The analogy assumes that kidney sales are banned for paternalistic reasons. But there may be other, non-paternalistic reasons for the ban. And paternalists, too, can consistently defend the ban even if kidney sales are no riskier than occupations that they find acceptable. Soft paternalists may want to protect would-be vendors from harms that they have not voluntarily chosen. Egalitarian hard paternalists may want to protect already badly off vendors from further worsening their situation. For neither species of paternalist is the size of the risk prevented decisive. I conclude that the analogy with dangerous jobs, while rhetorically powerful, pulls little real argumentative weight. Future debates on living kidney sales should therefore proceed without it.
authors.affiliation: Division of Health and Society, Department of Medical and Health Sciences (IMH), Linköping University, 581 83, Linköping, Sweden, erik.malmqvist@liu.se.
authors.forename: Erik
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Malmqvist
mesh_terms: D003132:Commerce / Q000941:ethics / Q000331:legislation & jurisprudence*; D004651:Employment; D006801:Humans; D016030:Kidney Transplantation / Q000941:ethics*; D026706:Paternalism / Q000941:ethics; D018570:Risk Assessment; D009927:Tissue and Organ Procurement / Q000191:economics* / Q000941:ethics*