Hey Joshua, I think the real question here is whether or not we should look at our bodies as a last-ditch social safety net. Obviously selling a kidney for an iPad2 is foolish, but lets consider your case of using the cash as startup capital. IT's true that the operation would give the person a bit of cash (but it's likely the broker would make much more) but can we assume that a recently post-op person is going to be in the physical shape to start that business? Also, are we saying that now the idea of micro-finance is going to be backed by human tissue instead of some other sort of collateral?

And what happens when organ selling becomes legal worldwide? Will poor people be lining up to sell their organs? Won't we just be creating a system where there is a massive export of flesh up the human supply chain from poor to rich? Just think of what would happen once we scale up the industry. While I was in India an entire village of Tsunami refugees all sold their kidneys over the course of a few months. Brokers took advantage of their desperation. I don't think that this sort of exploitation should be codified into law. But the question remains open to debate. Check out my book and tell me what you think. - Scott Carney

Who is to say this was a poor choice? If this young man is able to use the money he acquired from the sale to buy electronics, and then is able to use those electronic devices as essential capital in creating the next Youtube/Google/Facebook, then it would clearly have been a correct choice. In that instance the loss of the kidney would be offset by an otherwise impossible economic success, and would be a rational investment in starting his endeavor.

Of course that's unlikely, and in this case the kid isn't a legal adult, but there's no sensible reason to prohibit a transaction like that. Computers are the essential capital of the global information economy, and if an individual wants to lower their ability of performing factory labor in an attempt to participate in a different kind of market they should be, if anything, encouraged.

Without trying to veer into science fiction, I expect that our global information economy will continue to develop in such a way as to make this a more relevant question. Imagine that a person could give up their left hand and have it be replaced with some mechanical organ that would allow them to perform programming that would otherwise be impossible. Wouldn't this be desirable in many instances? Would allowing a person to make this choice really be substantively different that encouraging an 18 year old to take out tens of thousands of dollars in student loans?

Techno-social change can be scary, but there's no use in trying to avert it.

If an iPad 3 comes up in the near future, would he sell his remaing kidney? What an idiot.