Political philosophers have weird debates

The debate with Robert Nozick over self-ownership got to the level of do we own our own eyes or are they open for harvest and redistribution to be blind. Two working eyes is a matter of genetic luck

G.A. Cohen in Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality says your right to your own body outweighs commonly used socialist principles that mandate redistribution. You are entitled to keep your eyes even if the fact that you have two working eyes is a matter of genetic luck and even if a blind person needs an eye more than you do.  Good eyes are the winnings of the genetic lottery and yet

They do not immediately agree that, were eye transplants easy to achieve, it would then be acceptable for the state to conscribe potential eye donors into a lottery whose losers must yield an eye to beneficiaries who would other- wise be not one-eyed but blind.

Cohen then concluded that our real objection to an eye lottery in the actual world is not that it violates self-ownership but that people have a right to bodily integrity.

p.s. English moral philosopher, John Harris, does support a compulsory organ lottery

HT: David Gordon

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