ABSTRACT
The idea of consent, or valid consent, has both a primary and a secondary role within the body commodification debate. The primary role is that it’s thought by many to explain directly the wrongness of certain commercial practices. For example, it has been argued both that surrogate mothers and that people who sell parts of their bodies (for example, kidneys) don’t, or can’t, validly consent. For this reason (so the argument goes) such practices are wrong, since interactions that are as intimate, or as dangerous, as these ought to be properly consensual. Consent’s secondary role is the contribution that it makes to the justification of exploitation claims. For, as we’ve already seen, most (maybe even all) instances of exploitation appear to involve a consent that is somehow defective or inadequate.
