Pecuniary and Non-Pecuniary Incentives to Increase the Rate of Organ Donations from the Living: A Moral Exploration

This paper examines the morality of schemes of payment to live donors/sellers of organs for transplantation. Following empirical and historical evidence, it is argued that consent to sell organs is substantially different from consent to ordinary business transactions and that legalization of exchanges of organs with financial benefits deviates significantly from the scope of liberal toleration and liberal conceptions of human rights. Although altruistic giving is commendable, it is immoral for society to benefit from them without conferring to the donors benefits such as health and nursing insurance for life. Non-alienable and non-fungible benefits of this kind are moral as incentives to organ donation/giving

Speciesism as a precondition to justice

ABSTRACT. Over and above fairness, the concept of justice presupposes that in any community no one member's wellbeing or life plan is inexorably dependent on the consumption or exploitation of other members. Renunciation of such use of others constitutes moral sociability, without which moral considerability is useless and possibly meaningless. To know if a creature is morally sociable, we must know it in its community; we must know its ecological profile, its species. Justice can be blind to species no more than to circumstance. Speciesism, the recognition of rights on the basis of group membership rather than solely on the basis of moral considerations at the level of the individual creature, embodies this assertion but is often described as a variant of Nazi racism. I consider this description and find it unwarranted, most obviously because Nazi racism extolled the stronger and the abuser and condemned the weaker and the abused, be they species or individuals, humans or animals. To the contrary, I present an argument for speciesism as a precondition to justice