A few days ago, I posted about the Planned Parenthood video, which had been edited together to make it seem as though PP administrators commodified (bought and sold) organs and tissues from aborted fetuses. Apparently, that’s not really true; they just sometimes ask for compensation for their costs, but they don’t try to profit from it.

The thesis of Markets without Limits is that anything you may do or give away for free, you may do or give away for money, and anything you may acquire for free, you may acquire for money. There are limits to what may rightly be bought and sold, but the limits don’t originate in the market. Instead, there are things you may not buy or sell because you shouldn’t have them (or do them) in the first place. For example, you shouldn’t sell or buy child pornography, assassination services (except of people who have may rightfully be killed), enslaved sex workers, chattel slaves, nuclear bombs, and the like, not because the market in these introduces wrongness into what was otherwise permissible possession or use, but because you shouldn’t have or use those things in the first place. We call this the Principle of Wrongful Possession: Generally, if it’s wrong to have or do, period, then it’s wrong to have or do for money.

That’s not an interesting limit on markets. In parallel, it’s wrong to lie, cheat, and steal (except in special circumstances). It follows trivially that it’s wrong to lie, cheat, and steal while wearing a hat. But it would be weird to then write a book about the limits of hat wearing, describing how it’s wrong to wear hats while lying, cheating, and stealing. The hat isn’t the problem here, is it? (Of course, markets in bad things can cause more of those bad things to happen or exist, but that goes along with our point.)

With that, consider commodifying dead baby parts:

1. Assume for the sake of argument that abortion is not murder, and that the baby parts are rightfully possessed by Planned Parenthood. In that case, we’d then conclude that it’s perfectly fine to buy, trade, and sell dead baby parts. (There’s a list of objections to this thesis below.)

2. Assume instead that the abortion is murder, and the baby parts are not rightfully possessed by Planned Parenthood. In that case, PP shouldn’t sell the baby parts because they ought not to have them in the first place. That’s no more interesting than saying PP shouldn’t go behind my nana’s back to sell my dead grandpa’s corpse right out of his grave.

The wrongness of abortion doesn’t necessarily lead to the conclusion that selling fetal tissue is wrong. Think of it this way: The fetuses are dead. Assume that was wrong. But, now, Planned Parenthood has a bunch of fetal tissue. Now, if you think the fetuses are entitled to a proper burial, then you think PP shouldn’t possess the fetal tissue in the first place, so of course they shouldn’t sell it.

But let’s assume the fetuses are not entitled to a proper burial. What should PP do with the tissue? Let it rot in a dumpster? Burn it? Or should it use it to save lives or cure illnesses, by giving it away?

Consider: Suppose my neighbor routinely murders homeless people in DC. After he kills them, he burns their bodies, since no one will claim them and no one is willing to pay to give them a proper burial. My other neighbor also routinely murders homeless people. Afterwards, though, rather than letting the bodies go to waste, he harvests the organs and saves lives with them. Suppose he doesn’t kill them in order to harvest the organs. Suppose that if he had to let the bodies rot or burn, that wouldn’t at all reduce the number of homeless people he murders Rather, he kills homeless people for personal reasons, but just figures, now that they’re dead, there’s no point in letting the bodies rot when you can save lives with them. (In parallel, I’d be surprised if women abort their fetuses in order to harvest the organs, but, if they were forbidden from doing so,  would not have had the abortion.) Both of my neighbors are awful people, but the first neighbor is worse. Or, at least, the second neighbor isn’t worse. I can’t see why his using the bodies to save lives rather than letting them rot introduces more evil into the world.

Or, suppose you’re in Germany in 1943. You are powerless to stop the Nazis from killing Jews en masse. However, you convince Hitler and his ilk to think like economists, that is, to think on the margin. Suppose you can convince them that rather than gassing Jews and wasting their bodies, they should behead them, and instead harvest the organs to help save dying German children. Suppose you can implement this plan in such a way that not a single Jew is killed in order to harvest the organs. Rather, each Jew that gets killed was going to be killed anyways. In this case, while it’s evil to kill the Jews, the decision to use their bodies to save lives seems like a moral improvement over the status quo.

Here, many readers might agree, but then say that they object to putting those organs or body parts on the market. They’re likely to have a number of major kinds of objections to commodifying fetal tissues:

1. Exploitation: Markets in some good or service might encourage the strong to exploit (to take unjust advantage of) the vulnerable.
2. Corruption: Participating in certain markets might tend to cause us to develop defective preferences or character traits.
3. Misallocation: Commodifying certain goods is likely to cause the goods to be allocated in an unjust way.
4. Exploitation: Commodifying certain goods is impossible without thereby enable some people to take pernicious advantage of others’ misfortune.
5. Harm to Self or Others: Commodifying certain goods is impossible without causing wrongful harm to oneself or to others.
6. Semiotic: Participating in markets can express or communicate certain negative attitudes, or is incompatible with holding certain positive attitudes. A semiotic objection to commodification holds that, independently of other objections, to allow a market in some good or service X is a form of communication that expresses the wrong attitude toward X or expresses an attitude that is incompatible with the intrinsic dignity of X, or would show disrespect or irreverence for some practice, custom, belief, or relationship with which X is associated. So, for instance, some hold that organ sales communicate the idea that the human body is a mere commodity—a piece of meat—and thus fail to show proper reverence for the body. Others say that markets in surrogacy services express the idea that women are mere incubation machines.

What Peter and I do in Markets without Limits is systematically debunk each of these kinds of objections. It takes us a book to do that, so I can’t just insert the argument here. But the end result is that a market in body parts is morally permissible. Indeed, it’s probably morally preferable, because it’s likely to do a better job saving lives than non-market alternatives, especially, of course, the alternative of letting the body parts rot.