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Alsadius comments on Stupid Questions February 2015 - Less Wrong
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Why do we not allow people to sell organs? If it is a medical worry or a problem with people getting ripped off, a national regulatory body (there is already an organization that regulates organ donation), should solve those problems.
The concern is that we don't want poor people forced to sell parts of themselves to pay off their debts - it's a bit too Merchant of Venice. (I think it'd still be good policy, because I don't see how them not having the choice is any better, but that's the common concern)
In game theory, sometimes "not having a choice" is an advantage.
Imagine that you are a poor person, someone kidnaps your children and asks $100.000 from you.
Scenario A: Okay, this is not realistic. If they know you are poor, you don't have a chance to give them $100.000. So actually they will not kidnap your children.
Scenario B: You can sell your body parts for $100.000. Any they know it.
That's a fully general argument against having any capabilities.
No, it's not, for several reasons:
The utility that people gain from money is not linear (and the utility that people lose when losing $X worth of organs is really not linear). Making it possible to extort $100000 from someone who has a lot of money, then, causes less of a loss in utility to them than making it possible to extort $100000 from someone who would have to sell his organs to get the money.
It is easier, in general, to extort a poor person for $X than a rich person for the same amount, for hopefully obvious reasons. For instance, the poor person can't hire a private detective, bribe the police, or use his connections to track down the kidnapper, and the kidnapping is much less likely to make the national news. And it is much less likely that when you kidnap his kids you piss off some very important people.
It is easy for the kidnapper to figure out that someone has organs. It is harder for the kidnapper to figure out that they have $100000 in a bank account (unless they are rich enough to fall into category 2) or that they can feasibly mortgage their house within a short time.
The market price for organs is not that high compared to how much the person would lose in utility from losing the organs. So a more plausible scenario is that the kidnapper asks for $10000, which is the sale price of the organs, but the person with the organs loses the utility that he would lose from losing $1000000 in cash. If the kidnapper instead extorted someone who had money, they would not lose as much utility.
"The Bangladesh poor selling organs to pay debts" http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-24128096
Yeah, that. There's no way of getting money that's so ugly that some poor, desperate person somewhere won't try.