willil8+comments+week+10+Scheper-Hughes

Reading the chapter by Scheper-Hughes, brings to mind "Cost-Benefit Analysis", specifically, how it was used in the Ford Pinto case, where a value of $200,000 was placed on a human life + burial. With a $15,000 value on a Peruvian housewife's kidney (Scheper-Hughes), it seems that in making decisions in medicine, we (Westerners) are choosing an unethical form of Cost-Benefit Analysis.

As part of our socialization as unknowing neoliberals, we have quantified our bodies in terms of market-transactions (their increase, and efficiency) while excluding humanistic or religious points of view as trivial. The "sophisticated activist" that supports free-market kidney transplants desires healing and restored human function NOW (with a transplant) versus later (with a waiting list and hemodialysis machine). Also fitting into neoliberalism, are increasingly GLOBAL transactions and privatization of care.

"How can a national government set a price on a healthy human being's body part without compromising essential democratic and ethical principles that guarantee the equal value of all human lives?...Putting a market price on body parts - //even a fair one// - exploits the desperation of the poor, turning suffering into an opportunity….Market-oriented medical ethics creates the semblance of ethical choice…in an intrinsically unethical context." (Scheper-Hughes) Emphasis Added.

There is no such thing as a "fair" price for an organ that is being removed from someone else's body. An organ is a "gift that keeps on giving", and you cannot put a price on life. Any money tendered in this transaction is, as in the case of the Ford Pinto, just enough to quiet a guilty conscience.

Scheper-Hughes, Nancy **"Chapter 9: The Last Commodity: Post-Human Ethics and the Global Traffic in 'Fresh' Organs"** Ong, Aihwa and Collier, Stephen J., eds (2005) Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics and Ethics as Anthropological Problems. Oxford: Basil Blackwell