What makes this work so important is that it returned the body to the forefront of philosophy for the first time since Plato.

Transplantation continues to push the frontiers of medicine into domains that summon forth troublesome ethical questions. Looming on the frontier today is human facial transplantation. We develop criteria that, we maintain, must be satisfied in order to ethically undertake this as-yet-untried transplant procedure. We draw on the criteria advanced by Dr. Francis Moore in the late 1980s for introducing innovative procedures in transplant surgery. In addition to these we also insist that human face transplantation must meet all the ethical requirements (...) usually applied to health care research. We summarize the achievements of transplant surgery to date, focusing in particular on the safety and efficacy of immunosuppressive medications. We also emphasize the importance of risk/benefit assessments that take into account the physical, aesthetic, psychological, and social dimensions of facial disfiguration, reconstruction, and transplantation. Finally, we maintain that the time has come to move facial transplantation research into the clinical phase. (shrink)

On one view, limb transplants cross technological frontiers but not ethical ones; the only issues to be resolved concern professional competence, under the assumption of patient autonomy. Given that the benefits of limb transplant do not outweigh the risks, however, the autonomy and rationality of the patient are not necessarily self‐evident. In addition to questions of resource allocation and informed consent, limb, and particularly hand, allograft also raises important issues of personal identity and bodily integrity. We present two linked schemas (...) for exploring ethical issues in limb transplants. The first, relying on conventional concepts in biomedical ethics, asks whether the procedure is research or therapy, whether the costs outweigh the benefits, and whether it should be up to the patient to decide. The second introduces more speculative and theoretically challenging questions, including bodily integrity, the argument from unnaturalness, and the function of the hand in expressing personal identity and intimacy. We conclude that limb transplants are not ruled out a priori, unlike some procedures that are prima facie wrong to perform, such as amputation of healthy limbs to relieve body dysmorphic disorders. However, their legitimacy is not proven by appeals to the interests of scientific research, cost‐benefit, or patient autonomy. (shrink)