Nicky Cheese

Virginia Postrel, author of The Future and Its Enemies–one of my favorite pieces of political nonfiction–is featured in reason.tv’s latest video entitled Organ Transplants: Kidneys for Sale (I had a blog post with the same subtitle here).

‘What’d she do–donate her kidney?’

Why yes she did! In order to save an ally’s life. In order to make a larger political and moral point. In order to make some money. Err, can’t do that…

[quicktime]http://s3.amazonaws.com/reasontv-video/reasontv_video_333.mp4[/quicktime]

Hands down, the most absurd argument against organ-markets comes from UCLA’s Dr. Gabriel Danovitch, stating that money compromises what was previously an altruistic donation, that the dollar signs negate the selfless goodness of the action.

“Because they don’t care about each other…We’re going to take the caring about of it and it’s becomes a matter of paying off people.”

What is he, crazy? Pushing a form of Kantian duty as the legal standard?! Yamma-hamma. Now I don’t tow the Randian line when it comes to detesting all things Kant–she definitely threw out the baby with the bathwater in that regard–but her diagnosis of Kant’s moral philosophy is right on:

What Kant propounded was full, total, abject selflessness: he held that an action is moral only if you perform it out of a sense of duty and derive no benefit from it of any kind; neither material nor spiritual; if you derive any benefit, your action is not moral any longer.

Not the best criteria to base legislation upon.

On the other hand, maybe it does work! Courtesy of the Onion, Anonymous Philanthropist Donates 200 Human Kidneys to Hospital:

[youtube]D_5nLxZVoPo[/youtube]

UPDATE: I wish I was clever enough to think of the following title for this post: Kant get a kidney? No Wonder. It’s an article by Thomas L. Knapp that I found after the fact in Rational Review. Great stuff that goes further to make the Kant/kidney connection.