In August 2000, Arthur Matas and his colleagues de scribed a protocol in which their institution began to accept as potential donors, individuals who came to the University of Minnesota hospital offering to donate a kidney to any patient on the waiting list. Matas and his colleagues refer to these donors as nondirected donors by which is meant that the donors are altruistic and that they give their organs to an unspecified pool of recipients with whom they have no emotional (...) relationship. This paper represents an ethical and policy critique of the nondirected donation protocol that was implemented at the University of Minnesota in August 1999. Specifically, I address the ethical questions: Whether altruistic living solid organ donations by strangers should be permitted? And if so, What are appropriate ethical guidelines for such donations? (shrink)

In August 2000, Arthur Matas and his colleagues de scribed a protocol in which their institution began to accept as potential donors, individuals who came to the University of Minnesota hospital offering to donate a kidney to any patient on the waiting list. Matas and his colleagues refer to these donors as nondirected donors by which is meant that the donors are altruistic and that they give their organs to an unspecified pool of recipients with whom they have no emotional (...) relationship. This paper represents an ethical and policy critique of the nondirected donation protocol that was implemented at the University of Minnesota in August 1999. Specifically, I address the ethical questions: Whether altruistic living solid organ donations by strangers should be permitted? And if so, What are appropriate ethical guidelines for such donations? (shrink)

W0mcn’s liberation, it is oftcn said, strikes closer t0 home than othcr forms of human liberation. Although basic shifts in attitudes arc required for thc liberation 0f, for example, workers 0r blacks and othcr ethnic minorities, thcsc types of liberation could bc accomplished without fundamental changes in what we call 0ur “privatc" lives or 0ur personal relationships. The liberation 0f blacks 0r workers is largely an affair 0f public roles and institutions, 21 matter 0f socialjusticc, and it is thus carried (...) 0ut relatively impcrsonally and anonymously in the marketplace and workplace, thc university and governmental institutions. Granted, if thc liberation 0f blacks and workers is t0 bc complete, I might have t0 bc willing t0 have some in my club and my suburb. Somc 0f my bcst friends might then bc blacks 0r workers, and I might even have t0 bc willing t0 have my daughter marry 0nc. Nonetheless, it might well be truc that my club and neighborhood, my friendships, and my relationship t0 my daughter could go 0n pretty much as bcforc, 0ncc "thcy” had been admitted. (shrink)

In 1999, a case was described on national television in which a woman had enlisted onto an international bone marrow registry with the altruistic desire to offer her bone marrow to some unidentified individual in need of a transplant. The potential donor then was notified that she was a compatible match with someone dying from leukemia and gladly donated her marrow, which cured the recipient of the disease. Years later, though, the recipient developed end-stage renal disease, a consequence of the (...) high-dose chemotherapy she received earlier to destroy her stem cells and prepare her for the bone marrow transplant. Finding a suitable donor for a kidney transplant proved extremely difficult. Desperate, she requested that the donor registry personnel help her locate the individual who earlier was determined to be a compatible donor and asked this now-identifiable individual to consider donating one of her two normally functioning kidneys for a kidney transplant. (shrink)

This paper examines the ethical difficulties of organ donation from living donors and the problem of causing harm to patients or research subjects at their request. Graham Greene explored morally similar questions in his novella, The Tenth Man.