SOME OF THE WAYS LIBERTARIANISM WORKS

                                           Selling Kidneys

   Most countries ban the buying and selling of organs for transplantation. In the United States, people may donate one of their kidneys but not sell it on the open market. But some people argue that such laws should be changed. They point out that thousands of people die each year waiting for kidney transplants --- and that the supply would be increased if there existed a free market for kidneys. They also argue that people in need of money should be free to sell their kidneys if they wish. 
   One argument for permitting the buying and selling of kidneys rests on the libertarian notion of self-ownership : If I own my own body, I should be free to sell my body parts as I please. As one libertarian scholar writes, "The central core of the notion of a property right in X is the right to determine what shall be done with X." But few advocates of organ sales embrace the full libertarian logic.  
   Here's why : Most proponents of markets in kidneys emphasize the moral importance of saving lives, and the fact that most people who donate one of their kidneys can manage with the other one. But if you believe that your body and life are your property, neither of these considerations really matters. If you own yourself, your right to use your body as you please is reason enough to let you sell your body parts. The lives you save or the good you do is beside the point. 
   To see how this is so, imagine two atypical cases :
   First, suppose the prospective buyer of your spare kidney is perfectly healthy. He is offering you (or more likely a peasant in the developing world) $8,000 for a kidney, not because he desperately needs an organ transplant but because he is an eccentric art dealer who sells human organs to affluent clients as coffee table conversation pieces. Should people be allowed to buy and sell kidneys for this purpose ? If you believe that we own ourselves, you would be hard pressed to say no. What matters is not the purpose but the right to dispose of our property as we please. Of course, you might abhor the frivolous use of body parts and favor organ sales for life-saving purposes only. But if you held this view, your defense of the market would not rest on libertarian premises. You would concede that we do not have an unlimited property right in our bodies. 
   Consider a second case. Suppose a subsidence farmer in an Indian village wants more than anything else in the world to send his child to college. To raise money, he sells his spare kidney to an affluent American in need of a transplant. A few years later, as the farmer's second child approaches college age, another buyer comes to his village and offers a handsome price for his second kidney. Should he be free to sell that one, too, even if going without a kidney would kill him ? If the moral case for organ sales rests on the notion of self-ownership, the answer must be yes. It would be odd to think that the farmer owns one of his kidneys but not the other. Some might object that no one should be induced to give up his life for money. But if we own our bodies and lives, then the farmer has every right to sell his second kidney, even if this amounts to selling his life. (The scenario is not wholly hypothetical. In the 1990s, a California prison inmate wanted to donate a second kidney to his daughter. The ethics board of the hospital refused.)
   It is possible, of course, to permit only those organ sales that save lives and that do not imperil the life of the seller. But such a policy would not rest on the principle of self-ownership. If we truly own our bodies and lives, it should be up to us to decide whether to sell our body parts, for whatever purposes, and at whatever risk to ourselves.

                                      Assisted Suicide

   In 2007, Dr. Jack Kevorkian, age seventy-nine, emerged from a Michigan prison having served eight years for administering lethal drugs to terminally ill patients who wanted to die. As a condition of his parole, he agreed not to assist any more patients in committing suicide. During the 1990s. Dr. Kevorkian (who became known as "Dr. Death") campaigned for laws allowing assisted suicide and practiced what he preached, helping 130 people end their lives. He was charged, tried, and convicted of second-degree murder only after he gave the CBS television program 60 Minutes a video that showed him in action, giving a lethal injection to a man suffering Lou Gehrig's disease. 
   Assisted suicide is illegal in Michigan, Dr. Kevorkian's home state, and in every other state except Oregon and Washington. Many countries prohibit assisted suicide, and a only a few (most famously the Netherlands) expressly permit it.
   At first glance, the argument for assisted suicide seems a textbook application of libertarian philosophy. For the libertarian, laws banning assisted suicide are unjust, for the following reason : If my life belongs to me, I should be free to give it up. And if I enter into a voluntary agreement with someone to help me die, the state has no right to interfere.
   But the case for permitting assisted suicide does not necessarily depend on the idea that we own ourselves, or that our lives belong to us. Many who favor assisted suicide do not invoke property rights, but argue in the name of dignity and compassion. They say that terminally ill patients who are suffering greatly should be able to hasten their deaths, rather than linger in excruciating pain. Even those who believe we have a general duty to preserve human life may conclude that, at a certain point, the claims of compassion outweigh our duty to carry on. 
   With terminally ill patients, the libertarian rationale for assisted suicide is hard to disentangle from the compassion rationale. To assess the moral force of the self-ownership idea, consider a case of assisted suicide that does not involve a terminally ill patient. It is, admittedly, a weird case. But its weirdness allows us to assess the libertarian logic on its own, unclouded by considerations of dignity and compassion. 

                            Consensual Cannibalism 

   In 2001, a strange encounter took place in the German village of Rotenburg. Bernd-Jurgen Brandes, a forty-three-year-old software engineer, responded to an Internet as seeking someone willing to be killed and eaten. The ad had been posted by Armin Meiwes, age forty-two, a computer technician. Meiwes was offering no monetary compensation, only the experience itself. Some two hundred people replied to the ad. Four traveled to Meiwes's farmhouse for an interview, but decided they were not interested. But when Brandes met with Meiwes and considered his proposal over coffee, he gave his consent. Meiwes proceeded to kill his guest, carve up the corpse, and store it in plastic bags in his freezer. By the time he was arrested, the "Cannibal of Rotenburg" had consumed over forty pounds of his willing victim, cooking some of him in olive oil and garlic.
   When Meiwes was brought to trial, the lurid case fascinated the public and confounded the court. Germany has no law against cannibalism. The perpetrator could not be convicted of murder, the defense maintained, because the victim was a willing participant in his own death. Meiwes's lawyer argued that his client could be guilty only of "killing on request," a form of assisted suicide that carries a maximum five year sentence. The court attempted to resolve the conundrum by convicting Meiwes of manslaughter and sentencing him to eight and a half years in prison. But two years later, an appeals court overturned the conviction as too lenient, and sentenced Meiwes to life in prison. In a bizarre denouement to the sordid tale, the cannibal killer has reportedly become a vegetarian in prison, on the grounds that factory farming is inhumane.
   Cannibalism between consenting adults poses the ultimate test for the libertarian principle of self-ownership and the idea of justice that follows from it. It is an extreme form of assisted suicide. Since it has nothing to do with relieving the pain of a terminally ill patient, it can be justified only on the grounds that we own our bodies and lives, and may do with them what we please. If the libertarian claim is right, banning consensual cannibalism is unjust, a violation of the right to liberty. The state may no more punish Armin Meiwes than it may tax Bill Gates and Michael Jordan to help the poor.