Benefits of Live Donation

A heart-warming story about an 'altruistic' (or live) kidney donor receiving a letter of thanks from the family she helped here. It's good to see donation get regular good press, rather than only being covered when there are scandals.

For the record, the scare quotes round 'altruistic' in the first sentence are not intended to question Ms Pretty's obvious altruism; rather, I find it odd that live donors who donate to strangers (rather than relatives) are referred to as 'altruistic donors', given the commonplace belief that all donations should be altruistic - a reasoning which is often appealed to in order to resist incentives for donors.

If you're interested in this issue, there's a nice piece by Greg Moorlock discussing the altruism requirement in the Journal of Medical Ethics (open access). The next meeting of the RSE project, on Saturday 14th September, will focus on incentives and inducements, so look out for further posts on that theme.

Commemorating Donors

If I understand this story correctly, it seems that over £10,000 is being spent on a stained glass window to commemorate organ donors (£6,800 from the Tayside NHS Board Endowment Fund, plus £3,500 from Revival). It's an interesting question whether this is money well spent, or whether it could be used to fund potentially life-saving (or improving) treatment.

I think a common immediate reaction would be that it's a 'waste' of NHS (and other) money that could have been spent more productively. But, who knows, perhaps such gestures will encourage more people to donate, if only by generating publicity? I'd be interested to know whether any empirical work had been done on such matters. I don't, however, think its justification depends entirely on these instrumental considerations though. Arguably, norms of gratitude and reciprocity may make it appropriate to do something to recognise the gift of donors.

Nudge, Nudge

I discovered a 'new' (as in, new to me) weblog about nudging here, run by a group of geographers (mostly) from Aberystwyth. I've not thoroughly explored yet, but it looks interesting. In particular, of relevance here, are their comments on organ donation. (Richard Thaler's own favoured position is 'prompted choice', rather than 'presumed consent'.) Another interesting point is that the term 'nudge' was suggested by the publisher. Perhaps this explains why Thaler and Sunstein (infamously) don't clearly define it...

This all came to my attention because one of the blog authors, Jessica Pykett, is speaking at Stirling next week.

Priority for Donors

Last night, the following query was posted on the Philos-L mailing list:

In a recent book, "The Ethics of Transplants", Janet Radcliffe Richards proposes that organ donors should get preferential treatment on the donor waiting list compared to those who refuse to donate their organs. This seems to be to be a relatively commonsense, "anti-hypocrisy" measure. Indeed, it is so commonsense that I cannot help but feel that this proposal has been made elsewhere. Unfortunately, I have reached a dead-end in researching this idea; most discussion regarding hypocrisy in organ donation, sadly, revolves around organ selling.
Can someone point me in the direction of other bioethicists who have proposed a similar position regarding punishing those who refuse post-death organ donation?

I'm no expert on where this idea first came from, but I sent him a recent paper of mine from Bioethics which touches on the issue and has a couple of relevant references (in footnotes 21-22). Apparently, such a priority scheme already exists in Israel. An ethical analysis of this policy appeared in the journal Transplantation last year: here.

Needless to say, this is the kind of policy proposal that I'm very interested in exploring...