The Bible says it very clearly: The love of money is the root of all evil. Sophocles concurs: There's nothing in the world so demoralizing as money. And so does Themistocles: I choose the likely man in preference to the rich man; I want a man without money rather than money without a man. We've been constantly taught that money can't buy happiness, nor love and that pursuing financial activities with the sole purpose of accumulating wealth is wrong and dehumanizing.
Our aversion towards money reaches skyrocketing proportions when the object of the transaction is the human body, in its entirety or its constitutive parts. In most countries, prostitution is sanctioned both morally and legally. We cannot sell children, though it is very easy to commercialize one's eggs, sperm and wombs. We cannot sell blood and organs, but we can receive money for our hair, plasma, placenta or breast milk. We can sell the nakedness of our bodies for art, we can rent our skin for ad tattoos and, more importantly, we are encouraged to sell our physical presence to 9 to 5 jobs.
Although we can't really receive monetary gains from the commercialization of some parts of our bodies, people still donate blood and even organs. Is this a purely altruistic behavior? It might be, although most of the time some non-pecuniary benefits are involved in the transaction. Look at the famous domino transplants, for instance. People donate an organ only with the provision that a loved one can receive another compatible organ. Legally speaking, domino transplants can be classified as barter, which differs from any other financial trade operation through its use of currency. Basically, anything which is not money. Isn't it odd that most of our societies allow people to literally sell their organs, but do not permit them to receive money in exchange? Why should that be the case? Why is money the root of evil when it comes to these specific body parts?
As an exchange currency, money has the advantage of being transferred into any type of good. Money offers its holders the liberty to trade it according to their life views, plans and preferences. More importantly, money does not discriminate between quality and quantity. The same amount can equally pay for your school tuition or - do not laugh - buy you lots and lots of ice-creams, all at the same time. And here is where the taboo on selling organs becomes apparent. You see, when you give up one of your organs, you renounce a fully functional part of yourself that has an important role in keeping you alive and in ensuring your body's health and your overall well-being. Now, if for something as precious for life as a kidney, you receive something of a lower standard, then that transaction has been unfair for you. A kidney can be justly matched by another kidney, but it cannot be paid for with money because money may very well mean those lots and lots of ice-creams. Basically, there is no guarantee of receiving something of a comparable value.
The core idea behind this view is that, in some cases, the quality of a certain good cannot be easily encountered in other goods and, moreover, it cannot be balanced by a raise in quantity. The paternalist spirit that underlines this policy approach is very much willing to avoid the following situation: exchanging one precious piece for a huge pile of worthless junk.
As laudable as these paternalist intentions are, life in general and individual lives in particular are not black and white, but rather exhibit many shades of grey. More than fifty, for sure... In this context, it is very hard to assign rough values to our belongings, be they physical or not. Maybe a kidney is worth a house to a young couple that has just started their life together. Perhaps it is worth a trip to foreign lands to someone who only dreams about that. Anyways, the point is that it is not up to you or me or society at large to determine what counts as what in people's aspirations and life plans. As long as there is legal competency to make such a decision, then the values of autonomy and liberty should ensure and safeguard the selling of organs. Don't think that those willing to take this step would do it lightly. It's a part of their body, after all. It's a part of themselves. But it is their will and their choice. Also, organ selling, both before and after death, would partly alleviate the organ shortage that we're currently experiencing and it would put an end to the horrendous black market that has been created around the need to survive.
It is not a trivial matter to identify and understand the sources of those money taboos that apply to body parts. It might be paternalism. Or it might be religion. Don't forget that, according to most religious traditions, you do not own your body. Your body belongs to God and you're just its temporary possessor. As such, you cannot dispose of it as you wish because you do not actually own it. Also, these taboos might very well be rooted in ignorance or neglect of some biological facts. How else would you explain the legal difference between selling blood and selling plasma? We all know what blood is, we've seen it, we've read about it, we even build glorifying metaphors around it. The blood flowing through your veins, which can be either passionately red or aristocratically blue, nourishes you and keeps you alive. Moreover, your blood is the blood of your ancestors ...who would want to sell that? On the other hand, plasma is not as victoriously famous. Let's be honest. We don't really care what plasma is, what it does or where it came from. Plasma has no past and no story. So go ahead and feel free to sell it.
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