Organ markets and the ends of medicine.

ABSTRACT

As the gap between the need for and supply of human organs continues to widen, the aim of securing additional sources of these "gifts of the body" has become a seemingly overriding moral imperative, one that could-and some argue, should-override the widespread ban on organ markets. As a medical practice, organ transplantation entails the inherent risk that one human being, a donor, will become little more than a means to the end of healing for another human being and that he or she will come to have a purely instrumental value. With the establishment of organ markets, not only will the harms of instrumentalization be a reality-the ends of medicine will be further compromised and confused.