Stolen from the fairies

We all know who really owns teeth – tooth fairies of course.

And no, this is not a new WoW class.  It’s well established, at least in the UK, that if a child’s tooth falls out then that tooth properly belongs to the child but that this is a limited right of ownership that, by tradition, is subject to a RMT transaction with tooth fairies. I’m not quite sure what the current exchange rate is, I think that teeth are roughly pegged to inflation, Dr C probably has a paper on it somewhere.

According to this story from the BBC, these rights and transactions are subject to interference from state actors in given contexts. No. Really! In the reported case the child had a number of teeth taken out at a UK hospital. In this context the objects deemed no longer to be ‘teeth’ or physical items with a fairy based RMT value, but ‘body parts’ as such they fell under regulations concerning the disposal of said items.

As anyone who has read Boyle’s Shamans, Software & Spleens or has looked into the history of the relationship between bodies and property knows, this is complex and contentious area. What is interesting about this case is a clash between a procedural view of the world and, if a dare say it, a magic circle.

Can anyone remember their teeth falling out as a child? It’s a significant moment about which I’m sure that there is a lot of psychology written, the involvement of fairies must I’m sure have deep cultural roots.

Here we have a straight out clash. If one looks unimaginatively at laws and procedures that cover bits of humans I’m sure that one will find all manor of prohibitions. Organ donation law in the UK for instance states that such a transaction must be gratuitous i.e. not for money,  but in certain circumstances other values trump the black and white. 

In this case - I’m with the fairies.

Comments

[Psyae]

1.

Of course, the reasoning behind the law as such is for social policy purposes, with the ultimate goal to prevent body part "breeding"/farming for cash, whether legal or criminal. I.e., if you open up a cash for organ market, people will be making clones just to sell organs, or selling their kids, or kidnapping, or even having an excess number of children (unreported) just to sell their body parts.

There already exists an underground cash for organ market, generally available only to those with enough money to cover their trail.

An interesting question is, what if the government did allow for the open market of body parts? Would it dissolve the current endless waiting lists for body parts (assuming that the prices of anything formerly illegal will eventually settle at something reasonable), and allow all the needy people to get what they need? Or will there be an excess of people waking up in tubs of ice, missing a kidney or two, and maybe other parts?

Could the benefit outweigh the harm?

[and the docs have generally allowed me to reclaim my removed bits and pieces throughout the years, with, I think, one small exception]

[Tess]

2.

I became acutely aware of body part ownership issues, the day I saw my roommate throw my fingertip in the trash.

"Hey!" I said. "That was my fingertip! You threw it in the trash! There is a body part of mine IN THE TRASH!"

She turned very green, and took the garbage out.

[ren reynolds]

3.

Psyae > An interesting question is, what if the government did allow for the open market of body parts?

This is an interesting question and its one with quite a history of debate, as is the economics of Adoption.

It’s a different take on the issue I was trying to highlight. That is, that we configure this thing called property (i.e. we configure social relations round physical of virtual items) based on a range of motivations. And sometimes we respect stuff might seem trivial. Thus fairies, at times, have equal stature to legal fictions such as organisations as entities.

We could frame this in terms of affordances. But that seems to assume too much about where we might start from. I’d rather think that in some circumstances the based line for some items is that the law respects and supports their role in Fairy based RMT transactions.

I think that the market for body parts takes a different view. I think that its feels that the best way for us to, in fact, get to an ideal state of social ordering is to commoditise things in a general sense and then to let the market do the sorting, there is not need to an injection of ethics or values per se as the market will invisibly do this.

At this point I really wish I had finished Josh’s paper as I think it has interesting insights in this direction.

But right now. I don’t want to leave Fairies to the ravages of the market. Their wings are too delicate for that and I believe that their dust looses its powers and glimmer when subject to any exchange regime other than that of wishes.

[Michael Chui]

4.

OFF-TOPIC

There's a massive proliferation of spam cluttering up the Recent Comments section. Can we add one of those nifty "Type the letters in this human-readable image" to the comment-posting page?

[ren reynolds]

5.

The anti-spam Fairy has had a week off. We do our best and do IP block the worse offenders but it’s a chore. A lot of the actual spam text is just mundane so I guess we are starting to overlook it, though its annoying when you click on the comment link. I’ll have another cleaning session now I’m on half decent broad band, though I wish typepad was faster, that would make things a lot easier.

[Michael Chui]

6.

I've never used Typepad/Movable Type, so I'm unfamiliar with any tools or whatnot you might have available to you. Thanks for anything and everything.