“There are only about 20,000 kidneys every year for the approximately 80,000 patients on the waiting list. In 2008, nearly 5,000 died waiting.” sadly titled the newspaper the Atlantic on November 2011. This caption sentence lets us understand the alarming reality or organ donation and transplantation in the US. As matter of fact, the demand or organs is much higher than supply, leading to a consequent organ shortage. The waiting lists don’t stop to increase, people are waiting for so long to get an organ, and a lot of them die, after years and months of pain but also hope. As a confirmation, according to the website organdonor.org, “an average of 22 people die each day waiting for transplants that can't take place because of the shortage of donated organs.”. The following graph, coming from the same base, …show more content…
Firstly, let’s remind a bit its main elements. Utilitarianism, according to Jeremy Bentham, designates “the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong”. In other words, we should support any action that would enhance utility (utility is a pretty large concept including number of lives saved) of the whole society considered as one social body. Here, you don’t consider any individuals in particular, but really the set of people.
Thus, as we have been highlighting above, a lot of current societies are suffering from the shortage of available organs, leading people to wait for transplantation during an important duration, risking for their lives. By legalising the organ market, we would give financial incentives to people to sell their organs, or in other words, to not donate their organs without compensation, which would extremely increase the existent supply. In Iran (we will deal with that specific model later), after the legalisation of such a market, the waiting list have been completely erased by around 10 years