I wouldn’t be surprised if the ‘illegal organ markets’ in India have a lot of hidden pressures acting that makes the free choices less than free, and I think it might be true that any organ market would have unacceptable pressures, and should therefore not be allowed.

But I don’t think this is true a priori, nor that selling organs is so disgusting we shouldn’t even consider it. The alternative means, at this moment, that people die for no other reason than a lack of donors.

What I took to be John in California’s legitimate objection to your phrasing (or that reading of your phrasing, which is perhaps a mistaken one), is that these are not so much two distinct kinds of things as two positions on one sickening continuum.

So which in fact is a better description of what you meant to say? If the first, well, that is pretty repugnant in my view, too. If the second, well, fair enough.

No, the implication is that, simply as a matter of social process, there is a difference between a system that kidnaps and forcibly removes people’s kidneys, and a system where someone is offered a deal and takes money in exchange for one of their kidneys. Supporters of organ markets often point to the existence of functioning but illegal markets as evidence that there’s real demand and supply between willing transactors, and that in such cases everyone’s better off if there’s a legal market with the usual standards and protections. But this does not look like one of those cases.

The question of whether a market of this sort would be a good idea, or whether transactions in it would be exploitative, is a different one.

my point was, I thought, obvious. Healy is contrasting a “criminal racket”, ‘rackets’ a term generally reserved for something bad, with a “functioning market” , a term generally denoting something to be praised by libertarians. For someone like me, that thinks that almost no one would voluntarily sell their organs if they had some other legal way to get money, Healy’s implication that all would be well as long as no one is strong armed or duped, that is if it were a ‘functioning market’, I find repugnant .

Sure, they have other names to distinguish them: serfdom, helotry, debt bondage… Unless you want to use the term “slavery” to cover all forms of unfree labour, which rather robs the term of content.