• Decommodification as exploitation
    In Benjamin Ferguson & Matt Zwolinski (eds.), Exploitation: perspectives from philosophy, politics, and economics, Oxford University Press. 2024.
  • Family-Making: Contemporary Ethical Challenges, edited by Françoise Baylis and Carolyn McLeod
    International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 8 (2): 275-279. 2015.
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    Liberalism, commodification, and justice
    Politics, Philosophy and Economics 19 (1): 62-82. 2019.
    Anti-commodification theorists condemn liberal political philosophers for not being able to justify restricting a market transaction on the basis of what is sold, but only on the basis of how it is sold. The anti-commodification theorist is correct that if this were all the liberal had to say in the face of noxious markets, it would be inadequate: even if everyone has equal bargaining power and no one is misled, there are some goods that should not go to the highest bidder. In this paper, I resp…Read more
  •  311
    Paying for Plasma: Commodification, Exploitation, and Canada's Plasma Shortage
    Canadian Journal of Bioethics / Revue canadienne de bioéthique 2 (2): 1-10. 2019.
    A private, for-profit company has recently opened a pair of plasma donation centres in Canada, at which donors can be compensated up to $50 for their plasma. This has sparked a nation-wide debate around the ethics of paying plasma donors. Our aim in this paper is to shift the terms of the current debate away from the question of whether plasma donors should be paid and toward the question of who should be paying them. We consider arguments against paying plasma donors grounded in concerns about …Read more
  •  441
    Commodification, Inequality, and Kidney Markets
    Social Theory and Practice 44 (1): 121-143. 2018.
    People tend to be repulsed by the idea of cash markets in kidneys, but support the trading of kidneys through paired exchanges or chains. We reject anti-commodification accounts of this reaction and offer an egalitarian one. We argue that the morally significant difference between cash markets and kidney chains is that the former allow the wealthy greater access to kidneys, while the latter do not. The only problem with kidney chains is that they do not go far enough in addressing equality conce…Read more
  •  77
    Global surrogacy: exploitation to empowerment
    Journal of Global Ethics 9 (3): 329-343. 2013.
    Journal of Global Ethics, Volume 9, Issue 3, Page 329-343, December 2013
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    Exploitation, Justice, and Parity in International Clinical Research
    Journal of Applied Philosophy 30 (4): 304-318. 2013.
    Consensus is lacking among research ethicists on the question of how broadly to understand the requirements of non-exploitation in international clinical research. Two types of principles have been proposed, minimalist and non-minimalist, grounded in two opposing conceptions of exploitation, transactional and systemic. Transactionalists have offered principles, which, it has been argued, are satisfied by minimal gains to vulnerable subjects measured against an unjust status quo. Systemicists hav…Read more
  •  45
    Assisted Reproduction and Distributive Justice
    Bioethics 29 (2): 108-117. 2013.
    The Canadian province of Quebec recently amended its Health Insurance Act to cover the costs of In Vitro Fertilization . The province of Ontario recently de-insured IVF. Both provinces cited cost-effectiveness as their grounds, but the question as to whether a public health insurance system ought to cover IVF raises the deeper question of how we should understand reproduction at the social level, and whether its costs should be a matter of individual or collective responsibility. In this article…Read more
  •  132
    Surrogate Tourism and Reproductive Rights
    Hypatia 28 (2): 274-289. 2013.
    Commercial surrogacy arrangements now cross borders; this paper aims to reevaluate the traditional moral concerns regarding the practice against the added ethical dimension of global injustice. I begin by considering the claim that global surrogacy serves to satisfy the positive reproductive rights of infertile first-world women. I then go on to consider three powerful challenges to this claim. The first holds that commercial surrogacy involves the commodification of a good that should not be va…Read more
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    Basic income, decommodification and the welfare state
    Philosophy and Social Criticism 37 (8): 935-945. 2011.
    According to Philippe Van Parijs, the superiority of an unconditional basic income (UBI) over conventional means-tested liberal welfare state programs lies in its decommodifying potential. In this article I argue that even if a UBI was sustainable at high enough a level to lessen the extent to which an individual is forced to sell his or her labor power in the market, it would nonetheless have the adverse and simultaneous effect of forcing that individual into further market transactions to sati…Read more