Article Text
Abstract
The debate over financial incentives and market models for organ procurement represents a key trend in recent bioethics. In this paper, we wish to reassess one of its central premises—the idea of organ shortage. While the problem is often presented as an objective statistical fact that can be taken for granted, we will take a closer look at the underlying framework expressed in the common rhetoric of “scarcity”, “shortage” or “unfulfilled demand”. On the basis of theoretical considerations as well as a socioempirical examination of public attitudes, we will argue that this rhetoric has an economic subtext that imbues the debate with normative premises that have far-reaching social and ethical consequences and need to be made explicit and discussed.
Statistics from Altmetric.com
Read the full text or download the PDF:
Other content recommended for you
- Ethics, organ donation and tax: a proposal
- Elective ventilation and the politics of death
- The potential for non-heart beating organ donation within a paediatric intensive care unit
- Advance commitment: an alternative approach to the family veto problem in organ procurement
- Free riding and organ donation
- Public, medical professionals’ and patients’ preferences for the allocation of donor organs for transplantation: study protocol for discrete choice experiments
- DONORS (Donation Network to Optimise Organ Recovery Study): Study protocol to evaluate the implementation of an evidence-based checklist for brain-dead potential organ donor management in intensive care units, a cluster randomised trial
- Renal transplantation
- Shifting ethics: debating the incentive question in organ transplantation
- Join the Lone Kidney Club: incentivising live organ donation