Article Text
Abstract
It has traditionally been assumed that organ donation must be altruistic, though the necessity of altruistic motivations has recently been questioned. Few, however, have questioned whether altruism is always a good motive. This paper considers the possibility that excessive altruism, or self-abnegation, may be intrinsically bad. How this may be so is illustrated with reference to Tom Hurka’s account of the value of attitudes, which suggests that disproportionate love of one’s own good—either excessive or deficient—is intrinsically bad. Whether or not we accept the details of this account, recognising that altruistic motivations may be intrinsically bad has important implications for organ procurement. One possible response is to say that we should take further measures to ensure that donors have good motives—that they are altruistic is no longer enough. An alternative is to say that, since altruistic donation need not be intrinsically good, we have less reason to object to other motivations.
- donation/procurement of organs/tissues
- philosophical ethics
Statistics from Altmetric.com
Footnotes
Twitter Please follow Ben Saunders @DrBenSaunders
Funding The author has not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.
Competing interests None declared.
Patient consent Not required.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.
Presented at Earlier versions of this paper were presented to the Philosophy Department, University of Stirling (February 2013) and the Health Ethics And Law group, University of Southampton (October 2015).
Request Permissions
If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.
Copyright information:
Read the full text or download the PDF:
Other content recommended for you
- Imposing options on people in poverty: the harm of a live donor organ market
- Altruism in organ donation: an unnecessary requirement
- What constitutes a reasonable compensation for non-commercial oocyte donors: an analogy with living organ donation and medical research participation
- Demanding pure motives for donation: the moral acceptability of blood donations by haemochromatosis patients
- Self-interest, self-abnegation and self-esteem: towards a new moral economy of non-directed kidney donation
- Directed altruistic living donation: what is wrong with the beauty contest
- Human organs, scarcities, and sale: morality revisited
- A legal market in organs: the problem of exploitation
- Will you give my kidney back? Organ restitution in living - related kidney transplantation: ethical analyses
- The social rationale of the gift relationship