This talk is based on my forthcoming book, Organs for Sale, which is an extended case study of the bioethical question of how to increase human organ supply, focusing on the rhetoric of competing advocates, namely, the altruism-based status quo and market alternatives. But it is also an inquiry into what a public values and how and why it disagrees, and the relationship between morals and markets under conditions of ethical pluralism and democratic regimes. Deciding together about the limits of markets, of what is and ought to be for sale and why, is about organ policy in particular but, more significantly, it is also about the very kind of society in which citizens and markets exist, deliberate, and thrive.

Ryan Gillespie is a Lecturer in the Program for the Study of Religion at UCLA, where he teaches courses on and researches about morality, religion, medicine, and public disagreement, and also serves as the faculty advisor to the UCLA Journal of Religion. He has twenty publications in journals like Philosophy & Rhetoric, Harvard Theological Review, and Journal of Medical Humanities, and has just published his first book, Organs for Sale: Bioethics, Neoliberalism, and Public Moral Deliberation (University of Toronto Press, 2020). He earned his PhD from the University of Southern California.

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