A global redistributive auction for vaccine allocation.

The global allocation of vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic is widely perceived as unfair. Priority was given to countries that paid the most with little or no concern for who needed the vaccines the most. No satisfactory institutions have been established to allocate vaccines in a future pandemic. In this paper, we join reformers in proposing a new scheme for vaccine distribution: a global auction for vaccines where profits are distributed fairly to participating countries. Our proposal improves upon previous suggestions morally by taking countries' differing valuations of money and vaccines seriously. Since an auction is in the interest of both vaccine manufacturers and high-income countries, it is also politically feasible. A global redistributive auction for vaccines thus promises to be a robust and morally desirable way to allocate vaccines.

Ethical Solutions to the Problem of Organ Shortage.

Organ shortage is a major survival issue for millions of people worldwide. Globally 1.2 million people die each year from kidney failure. In this paper, we critically examine and find lacking extant proposals for increasing organ supply, such as opting in and opt out for deceased donor organs, and parochial altruism and paired kidney exchange for live organs. We defend two ethical solutions to the problem of organ shortage. One is to make deceased donor organs automatically available for transplant without requiring consent from the donor or their relatives. The other is for society to buy nonvital organs in a strictly regulated market and provide them to people in need for free.

Prize, not price: reframing rewards for kidney donors.

Worldwide 1.2 million people are dying from kidney failure each year, and in the USA alone, approximately 100 000 people are currently on the waiting list for a kidney transplant. One possible solution to the kidney shortage is for governments to pay donors for one of their healthy kidneys and distribute these kidneys according to need. There are, however, compelling objections to this government-monopsony model. To avoid these objections, I propose a small adjustment to the model. I suggest we reward kidney sellers with both money and a ceremony that celebrates their noble act. They should, in other words, receive a prize rather than a price.

Sex selection in India: Why a ban is not justified.

When widespread use of sex-selective abortion and sex selection through assisted reproduction lead to severe harms to third parties and perpetuate discrimination, should these practices be banned? In this paper I focus on India and show why a common argument for a ban on sex selection fails even in these circumstances. I set aside a common objection to the argument, namely that women have a right to procreative autonomy that trumps the state's interest in protecting other parties from harm, and argue against the ban on consequentialist grounds. I perform a pairwise comparative analysis of sex selection and its plausible alternatives and argue that that the ban fails to improve the state of affairs relative to a scenario without a ban. The ban makes the situation worse, especially for mothers and their daughters. India should therefore repeal its ban on sex selection.