Word: consent
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Although you're not advocating "presumed consent," in which the organs of an individual who dies are presumed available for donation unless he or she has forbidden it, you do support stronger measures to ensure more donation. What would these involve...
There's an intermediate ground between presumed consent and complete dependence--you could call it "required request." It would oblige physicians to ask [next of kin for permission to harvest organs]. With this sanction, that the doctors will always ask, it would overcome doctors' reluctance to do so, and reduce the trauma of the families. It would be a sanctioned part of social discourse which is something which, to me, we clearly should...
...volunteers, and thus, in effect, joins the research enterprise. Consent is the crucial event in the transition from therapy to experiment. It turns what would otherwise be technological barbarism into humane science. Consent suspends the Hippocratic injunction "First, do no harm." Moreover, it redeems not only the researcher but the researched. To be used by others is to be degraded; to give oneself to others is to be elevated. Indeed, consciously to make one's life the instrument of some higher purpose is the essence of the idea of service. If Barney Clark decides to dedicate his last days...
Infants, who can decide nothing, are the difficult case. (If Baby Fae had volunteered for her operation, the ethical questions would evaporate.) Since infants are incapable of giving consent, the parents do so on their behalf. In Baby Fae's case what kind of consent did they give? If her parents thought that the operation might save their child (i.e., that it was therapeutic), they were misled. There was no scientific evidence to support that claim. The longest previous human survival with a heart xenograft was 3½ days. (Baby Fae lived 17 more.) The longest animal survival...
Princeton Philosopher Paul Ramsey offers another version of that response. Ramsey comes from the other side of the great research debate. He argues that children may never be made guinea pigs and that we have no right to "consent" on their behalf. A most stringent Kantian, he would prohibit all experimentation on nonconsenting subjects. But for those of us who see the requirement for research as a moral imperative equal in force to the imperative to respect the individual, he counsels: if you must do it, do it, but do not deny the moral force of the imperative you violate...