Organ Conscription and Ethical Theory

Organ Conscription and Ethical Theory

Transplantation of vital organs began very experimentally in the 1950s and 1960s, but today it is well beyond the stage of medical experiment. Today transplantation of the kidney, liver, heart, lung, pancreas, and intestine (along with some other organs) is routine. From the start the procedures raised some ethical problems, some related to the fact that the demand for vital organs outpaces the supply. The majority of transplanted organs come from deceased donors. The problems are that only about 3 in 1,000 people die in a way that allows for organ donation, and only 48 percent of adults in the U.S. are signed up to be donors. Thus many organs that could be used are either buried or burned (cremation) because the deceased wasn’t a donor or the family of the deceased refused donation. The result is that 22 people a day die waiting for a transplant, which is a bit over 8,000 people a year.

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Organ Conscription

There are a number of proposals for solving this problem and creating a bigger supply of available organs, and therefore saving many lives. One of the more controversial is called organ conscription, which would require that every person who dies under the circumstances enabling organ transplantation, must automatically donate their organs. That is, each person would become a donor whether or not while living they consented to be a donor, and whether or not their family consents. Like a military draft, this would be a draft of organs from deceased people.

If implemented this policy would immediately raise the number of available organs and save many lives (for the purposes of your paper, let’s assume that the number of people who die waiting for an organ will be cut from 8,000 a year to 3,000). And under conscription there would be no need for expensive ongoing public education programs, no need to train requesters, and no need to maintain donor registries. All of these facts mean that money and resources would be freed up for use in other areas of health care.

Some morally relevant factors:

• Common sense morality and moral tradition in most cultures holds that (1) the living not only have strong claims over their bodies while living, but also over what happens to their bodies after they die; and (2) that family members of deceased people have a valid claim over what happens to the bodies of their loved one.
• Supporters of conscription claim that the dead do not have interests, do not have rights, cannot be harmed, and therefore have no valid claims over their body after they die. They add that the policy is fair, since it would apply to all and everyone would be treated in the same way.

Instructions: write a paper of 1,000 to 1,500 words on the ethics of organ conscription that answers the following questions:

1. How does Kantian moral theory apply? What would it say about organ conscription?

• Which formulation of the categorical imperative is most relevant to this issue and why?
• What would that formulation say about a policy of organ conscription?

2. How does rule utilitarianism apply? What would it say about organ conscription?

• Since we’re talking about a policy issue, it will be much easier to apply rule utilitarianism than act utilitarianism to it.

3. Explain your own view on the morality of conscription, and then discuss which theory better aligns with your view and why. If neither aligns with your own view all that well, explain why.

4. What do the theories leave out? That is, identify and explain at least one moral factor or aspect of the proposal that neither theory is able to sufficiently cover. You can combine this with step 3 if you want to.