Commodification in Organ Selling

There are a number of morally relevant considerations when it comes to organ selling (autonomy, coercion, religion, economics, etc.), but I would like to focus on the problem of commodification. The question I am interesting in answering is: Do you objectify yourself, treat yourself as a commodity, or otherwise put a price tag on life by selling your organs? It is also important to consider how much of the self is (or should be) identified with the physical person and how much is something other than physical. I will conclude that one cannot objectify oneself through merely selling your organs and that if one wants to argue against legal systems of organ selling the objectification argument is not enough.

It seem initially quite intuitive to consider the physicality of a human an essential part of what is our ontological self; we generally identify ourselves as a physical being. However, it seems fairly absurd to consider a kidney such a critical component of our self that selling it is in some sense objectifying your whole self. It seems clearly an commodification of your kidney, but I am not quite sure I understand how it is also a commodification of one's whole self. Your ontological self goes far beyond your physicality; a person has tangible and intangible components, but the intangible components (personality, opinions, beliefs, etc.) seem more central to one's full self than biological components. The biological components, like organs, support the existence of a self, but they are not the definition of one's self. The sense of ourselves is, or at least should be, defined by the less physical characteristics of ourselves.

I want to be clear, I think organ selling as shown in the Moniruzzaman article is immoral on the part of the broker and the recipient, but not on the poor Bangladeshi donors. The Bangladeshi donors seem especially morally defensible as they experience a combination of economic coercion, the manipulation of their autonomy, and a systemic repression that keeps them at low socioeconomic levels (similar to my points concerning sex slavery). Indeed, the broker and the recipient seem to commodify the poor Bangladeshi donor in that case; they both see the donor as a thing to harvest a kidney from because to treat someone as human is to not coerce or manipulate autonomy. I feel commodification or objectification of oneself cannot really occur through organ selling unless you are coerced or your autonomy is being manipulated and then it becomes a forced commodification of yourself by other people. My point is that the donors should not feel that they commodified themselves, but rather were commodified by other people which makes the other people's actions immoral. It is an error to consider the totality of yourself or your ontological self to be bound up in your physicality (i.e. a kidney). Additionally, f anyone is to argue with systems of legal organ selling, such as Iran's, I think an argument outside of the commodification argument must be used.