I don't presume to know, incidentally, whether every moral dilemma has a 100%-moral solution. If all choices you can think of by the time you must decide involve some degree of sin, I say do your best to choose the one with the least sin, and then throw yourself on the mercy of God.

That still sounds like a transaction to me, albeit one where the prices are very high.

I'm saying rightful worship and getting paid aren't mutually incompatible. For example, a priest may receive a salary for being a priest while worshiping God rightfully. Similar things could be said for many church musicians.

I can only guess as to what you mean by "the principle" that I am "championing", but whatever it is, I start by assuming that not everything is known to us when we make decisions. Knowing that we have to settle for our best guess rather than ironclad certainty doesn't strike me as a violation of any principal. It strikes me as humility.

Asking this question with the benefit of hindsight is incoherent. In real life, such decisions are perforce made prospectively.

An artist faced with the choice of either dying to preserve the work he has accomplished or living and perhaps accomplishing greater things might indeed choose wrongly. But presumably he knows himself best: there's no guarantee that anyone else could choose better.

Pfui. A Christian is within her rights to use  worship  as shorthand for "rightful worship of God". The rest can be labeled idolatry rather than worship. Now you're just nitpicking.

I can't help noticing that many people lead quite moral lives without being as absolutist as you about these things.

Unlike Kant, I'd have no problem lying to a murderer about the location of the person he'd like to murder. I would still consider my lie to be a sin, but I'd rather commit that sin and save a life than not. Telling the murderer, "I cannot tell you your prey's location" is an acceptable Kantian answer, but I wouldn't use it if I thought outright misdirection would be more effective.

If worship had less worth than a healthy human body, I would have to consider the martyrs who died for their faith and the saints who mortified their bodies as being either wicked or extremely foolish. And I don't.

Nor can I find it in my heart to despise an artist who would rather save his artistic corpus for posterity than his physical body -- if you can imagine a situation in which someone could make a guaranteed choice between the two. (Though whether I agreed with a particular artist's decision might depend on the quality of his art). Hypotheticals aside, many people do in fact sacrifice some portion of their physical health in pursuit of their craft, and I can't blame them for that.

Humans are in the image of God. The body is part of that image, but it may not always be the most important part.

A modest proposal:

The sexual revolution is not due, as many erroneously think, to the commodification of sex, but to its decommodification.

Women used to believe that sexual access to their bodies was a valuable commodity, something to be given away only when they received something of great worth in return. These days, such thinking is typically regarded as lamely outdated -- our modern sickness is to pretend that women have nothing to gain by reserving sex until it can be traded for something of great worth, like marriage.

"Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?" is an extremely old-fashioned attitude. And one that explicitly commodifies sex.

I agree with you in a sense: if an American man hasn't broadened the pool of women he meets to include Asian and Eastern European women, he should consider trying it.

On the other hand, suggesting that American men should write off American women as not worth the time would be silly.

Obviously, women tend to "marry against their type" more than men do. But plenty of men are happily married to women they could have easily dismissed as "not their type".

What's more, no man ever has to choose from a pool of "average American women". He can choose to affiliate himself with organizations in which the women (be they American, Asian, Martian, or other) are more likely to share his beliefs and interests.

Yuck! Not all women do. Or vampires for that matter.

Then again, while I've never believed that allowing herself to be swept away by a forceful man absolves a woman of guilt, I won't deny that many women apparently do feel this way. (Or at least many women like to use drunkenness as an excuse for doing what they "otherwise wouldn't".)

It's always tempting to impute
unlikely virtues to the cute.

At any rate, it would be rather pointless for  anybody   -- male or female -- to populate their fantasies with people they find unattractive.

Let's step away from organ donation a moment and see if you regard your idea about monetary worth killing moral worth as true in general:

Among other things, X could be:
worship, heroism, art, music, teaching, nursing...
Yet people who get paid for these things routinely believe their work  does  have transcendent moral value. They see themselves as following a calling -- fulfilling a natural human purpose -- as well as making a living.

The idea that moral purpose breaks down as soon as money enters the picture is a bit simplistic.

For me, kissing William Shatner at any age would be plenty of catch.

That's ambiguous isn't it?

I didn't know Vulcans were allowed to be punny.

...ever became common knowledge. Because engineers are clever enough to not get  caught.

(OK. It's not a great joke. But I did insert one.)

The allocation is no less straightforward than many others we allow economics to handle everyday.

And even without organ selling, geriatrics with poor prognoses can often afford more expensive medical care than young people with excellent prognoses, not just because of Medicare, but also because older people have more accumulated wealth. Do you find it non-obvious that that should be allowed to happen?

I wouldn't mind having a babel fish.

Though I'd be sad to see goofy mistranslations vanish entirely.

(Also, do you really want to know what your cat is saying?)