Janet Radcliffe Richards discusses organ donation, the legal paradoxes involved, and the impact of technology on both in her short essay. She expresses outrage and condemnation of the current organ donation legislation and the politicians who drafted it. Richards also philosophizes about the currently changing human perception of their body parts that has been driven by technical and medical progress. She argues that if people begin to view their body and its component parts as property in law, this will lead to more lives saved and improvements in related laws.
This writing seems childish and totally not persuasive to me. Richards misses the fact that legislators and related professionals view donated human organs differently from a property because they are directly related to human life and their physiological and mental well-being. After their initial host is deprived of organs dies, their existence becomes critical to the life of their new recipient. It is why the donor’s wishes do not have a decisive weight in such cases. One can say that the current legal status of donor organs is a semi-property.
Her idea of perceiving human organs as property in law is dangerous and harmful. For example, it could lead to the emergence of organ hunters who will forcibly remove them from people. Organ trafficking is already happening in impoverished countries and poor regions. If the global majority accepts such a perspective, it will lead to a worldwide spike of violence and brutality. Richards has a very individualistic, even selfish and egoistical, worldview. Moreover, her first paragraph clearly indicates that her perception of the situation is emotionally biased; decisions based on subjectivity alone are always bad ones.