He suggests that legalising organ sales not only satisfies buyer and seller, but also has the potential to eliminate the suffering of many patients requiring transplant surgery. Given such benefits, we should alter the law.

I beg to differ. While happy endings may be the immediate outcome from such transactions, the law is also responsible for safeguarding well-being, order and fairness in the long run.

Organ sales, even between willing parties, are always asymmetrical in their sales relationship. This means, once an organ is sold for a certain sum dictated by the market, the seller is unlikely to be able to buy it back in an emergency, even if he offers a much higher sum. If this is so, the willing sale of organs as a free-market transaction may distort the survival chances of parties who are equal before the law. Indeed, 'redundancies' in physiology - two eyes, two kidneys and so on - do not mean redundancies that can be leveraged for cash. Rather, physiological redundancies serve the precise function of maintaining the organism when one of the pair fails.

On the other hand, those who oppose legalised organ sales cite exploitation of the poor. To this, I wish to add that it is not only the poor who may be exploited, but likely the desperate as well, since one can be poor but not desperate. As a society, do we want to see the day when it is legal to cannibalise one's body to save a business, appease debtors or buy an expensive present for a child? And who will bear the social - and justly, medical - costs emerging from the loss of physiological redundancies in this group of already desperate sellers?

A gracious society is one in which limits are set to what can be sold, and what cannot. Biological organs are not commodities, but natural endowments to maximise one's chances of biological survival.

Jeffrey Chan