For me a well-functioning market with its way of aggregating dispersed information is a thing of beauty. But there are times when the role of markets becomes extremely contentious. There are some transactions that are just seen as beyond the pale. These prohibitions are not carved in stone. For centuries charging interest was seen as immoral. In The Divine Comedy Dante reserved a special place for usurers in hell. Buying and selling slaves was, on the other hand perfectly acceptable. Why do we let people seek employment as coal miners or chemical factory workers– but recoil if they want to work as prostitutes or human cannonballs? You can kill a horse to make pet food in California, but not for human consumption. Land is bought and sold every day but for many traditional cultures the idea of selling sacred land was taboo. You can’t go to a bookmaker and place a bet on your own death but life insurance is now considered okay. In particular, money and the human body are always uneasy bedfellows. Paying young women for eggs to be fertilized and men for sperm is now perfectly acceptable – they are still regularly referred to as “donors” even though these are economic transactions. The sale of tissue, cells and eggs for stem-cell research or organs for transplant are not considered acceptable. If you donate a kidney to prevent a death, you will be hailed as a hero, but if you take any money for it, you could well end up in jail.
What is coming into play here is what is known as the yuck factor, also known as the wisdom of repugnance. It argues that when something such as incest, cannibalism, or coprophagia (the consumption of feces), produces a knee-jerk reaction of disgust, it is because these acts are in themselves harmful and indeed evil. Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired magazine summed it up like this:
When it comes to thinking about how to regulate the science, the best test may be the “yuck factor.” This is, as you might imagine, a pretty squishy concept, something along the lines of using gut reaction as a proxy for a long and unproductive philosophical debate. Perhaps if people are grossed out by, say, vat-grown artificial organs, they may not be ready to use them wisely. Indeed, their gag reflex may be telling us something about the essence of human nature and what might threaten it.
There are many universal taboos, which may have evolved as a useful evolutionary defence mechanism. This notion of the wisdom of repugnance is however inherently problematic. It seems to be an appeal to emotion which implicitly rejects rationality. Here do we draw the line? It has also been applied to as same-sex marriage, abortion and cloning. In all cases, it expresses the view that one’s “gut reaction” trumps making a persuasive rational case against that practice.
Money is a relatively new invention in evolutionary terms and could be considered as somehow unnatural. As humans we operate in two mutually exclusive spheres. Hayek referred to it in his book The Fatal Conceit
Part of our present difficulty is that we must constantly adjust our lives, our thoughts and our emotions, in order to live simultaneously within different kinds of orders according to different rules. If we were to apply the unmodified, uncurbed, rules of the micro-cosmos (i.e., of the small band or troop, or of, say, our families) to the macro-cosmos (our wider civilisation), as our instincts and sentimental yearnings often make us wish to do, we would destroy it. Yet if we were always to apply the rules of the extended order to our more intimate groupings, we would crush them. So we must learn to live in two sorts of world at once. To psychologist Paul Bloom the problem is not that economists are unreasonable, they are in fact evil, assuming that everything is subject to market pricing unless proven otherwise. Economists dare to think the unthinkable.
If there is one subject where the introduction of market pricing is guaranteed to create a scandal then it is the selling of organs. Kidney transplants were first carried out in the 1950s. In the US in 2006 there were 74.000 people waiting for a kidney, 4,400 of whom died because of the shortage. Our old friend Gary Becker, in collaboration with Julio Jorge Elías, even calculated the price it would take to get rid of the backlog completely – about $15,000 for kidneys and about $35,000 for livers. According to Becker this wound also undermine the black market, particularly organ tourism, where people in need look for donors in countries which are not too scrupulous about enforcing these rules.
Becker may be right but I do not foresee this coming into law anytime soon – this “commodification” of the human body is just not going to be acceptable for the majority of the population. There are genuine fears that this could lead to the exploitation of the poor. We will have to look for other solutions. Spain has a successful policy of organ donation, using an opt-out system. You have to expressly make it known that you do not want your organs to be harvested. We could also allow payments to the families of these donors. Perhaps science will produce other solutions – xenotransplantation (using organs from other species) or the regeneration of organs. These however may prove equally controversial.
