CASEBOOK

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The issue of compensating organ donors is fraught ethically, economically, and geopolitically. Obviously, one needs to have died to donate certain organs, such as the heart, but for organs like the kidney, healthy individuals can live a long life after donating. Therefore, transplanting a kidney from a living person is a realistic option, in addition to harvesting the kidneys from someone who has recently died. But there are not enough people willing to become donors. Demand far exceeds supply.

The following casebook includes three of the selections that Maya Gomez included in her annotated bibliography and that she used to write her report and analysis. The first selection is the strongly worded National Kidney Foundation position paper, “Financial Incentives for Organ Donation,” (2003) arguing against liberalizing the 1984 National Organ Transplant Act’s restrictions on compensating kidney donors. In the second reading, economists Gary S. Becker and Julio J. Elías propose “Cash for Kidneys: The Case for a Market for Organs,” in a 2014 Washington Post op-ed. The third piece, “When Altruism Isn’t Moral” by kidney transplant recipient Dr. Sally Satel, takes a surprising stance toward the main objection to liberalizing NOTA: the moral argument that claims altruistic gift giving is the only moral solution. (Gomez compared the National Kidney Foundation’s position paper with Sally Satel’s op-ed to write her analysis.) A fourth selection, “A Moral Market” by law professor Eric Posner, appears in Chapter 7. Posner’s essay proposes “altruism exchanges” that would compensate kidney donors in a way he argues would be morally acceptable to those that oppose other kinds of compensation.