ABSTRACT
Mill was at the time campaigning for legal equality between men and women, and his assaults on conservative argument were so exhaustive, and so decisive, that we now find it hard to understand how his contemporaries could have persisted in their traditional beliefs. But that is probably because our feelings have shifted to Mill’s side of the case, rather than because we are better at allowing reason to challenge what is endorsed by
feeling. If Mill were to reappear now, in the midst of the simmering debate about kidney sales, he would certainly recognize the same phenomenon. The conviction that selling kidneys for transplantation must be wrong is the fixed point around which a series of defensive arguments has been constructed, and which seems to survive unscathed the refutation of any of them.
