Background Contemporary societies are rife with moral disagreement, resulting in recalcitrant disputes on matters of public policy. In the context of ongoing bioethical controversies, are uncompromising attitudes rooted in beliefs about the nature of moral truth?Methods To answer this question, we conducted both exploratory and confirmatory studies, with both a convenience and a nationally representative sample (total N = 1501), investigating the link between people’s beliefs about moral truth (their metaethics) and their beliefs about moral value (their normative ethics).Results Across (...) various bioethical issues (e.g., medically-assisted death, vaccine hesitancy, surrogacy, mandatory organ conscription, or genetically modified crops), consequentialist attitudes were associated with weaker beliefs in an objective moral truth. This association was not explained by domain-general reflectivity, theism, personality, normative uncertainty, or subjective knowledge.Conclusions We find a robust link between the way people characterize prescriptive disagreements and their sensibility to consequences. In addition, both societal consensus and personal conviction contribute to objectivist beliefs, but these effects appear to be asymmetric, i.e., stronger for opposition than for approval. (shrink)

Effective altruism is a growing philosophical and social movement, whose members design their lives in ways aligned with doing the most good that they can do. The main focus of this paper is to explore what effective altruism has to say about the moral obligations people have to do good with their organs, in the face of an organ-shortage problem. It is argued that an effective altruism framework offers a number of valuable theoretical and practical insights relevant to ongoing debate (...) about how to resolve the organ-shortage problem. Its recommendations constitute a plausible and promising strategy for increasing the supply of, and decreasing the demand for, human organs, in a way that protects the global poor. And, many of its recommendations can be implemented into policy without requiring that citizens actually become effective altruists themselves. (shrink)

This article focuses on examining the situation of organ trafficking in Africa from the aspect of pragmatist ethics. In the mainstream thought, the broader ethical dilemma of organ trafficking is viewed within the moral contestation of altruism as a rule for organ procurement and the resulting worldwide organ shortage. The incapability of altruistic transplant orthodoxy to serve as an applicable foundation for a public policy is considered as a reason for organ trafficking. In fact, to battle organ trafficking, utilitarian-inclined studies (...) suggest organ selling, compensated donations, and non-directed paid donations as practical alternatives. However, when investigating the context of organ trafficking in Africa, the issue goes beyond the mere moral dilemma of altruism and organ shortage. In the region, organ trafficking is rooted within more systemic, structural, socio-economic, and political problems, grounded in the abuse of transplantation, and connected to transplant tourism and migration, which needs a pragmatic multimodal solutions than the earlier mainstream pathways. In pragmatist ethics, the moral assessment and solutions to the underlying problems depend on the context wherein the moral problem arises. Pragmatist ethics does not stick to absolute moral theories; instead, it focuses on the relevant assessment of the felt moral problem in a given context and aims at seeking solutions afresh. Thus, in the subsequent sections, this article looks at the context of organ trafficking in Africa and reassesses it by incorporating it into the ethical debates of transplantation and organ procurements and trading. The final part of this article reflects on solutions with the reconsideration of the context of transplantation and organ trafficking in the region. (shrink)

Julian Koplin, drawing extensively on empirical data, has argued that vendors, even in well-regulated kidney markets, are likely to be significantly harmed. I contend that his reasoning to this conclusion is dangerously mistaken. I highlight two failures. First, Koplin is insufficiently attentive to the differences between existing markets and the regulated markets proposed by advocates. On the basis of this error, he wrongly concludes that many harms will persist even in a well-regulated system. Second, Koplin misunderstands the utilitarian assessment of (...) the market. He focuses on the costs and benefits of the transaction for the vendor. But, the relevant comparison is between an individual’s welfare across different courses of action, namely, vending and the nonvending alternative. Although Koplin’s empirically informed contribution is a welcome addition to this literature, the mistakes that pervade his interpretation of the data demand correction. (shrink)

Recent developments of three-dimensional printing of biomaterials in medicine have been portrayed as demonstrating the potential to transform some medical treatments, including providing new responses to organ damage or organ failure. However, beyond the hype and before 3D bioprinted organs are ready to be transplanted into humans, several important ethical concerns and regulatory questions need to be addressed. This article starts by raising general ethical concerns associated with the use of bioprinting in medicine, then it focuses on more particular ethical (...) issues related to experimental testing on humans, and the lack of current international regulatory directives to guide these experiments. Accordingly, this article considers whether there is a limit as to what should be bioprinted in medicine; examines key risks of significant harm associated with testing 3D bioprinting for humans; investigates the clinical trial paradigm used to test 3D bioprinting; analyses ethical questions of irreversibility, loss of treatment opportunity and replicability; explores the current lack of a specific framework for the regulation and testing of 3D bioprinting treatments. (shrink)

Due to the shortage of organs, it has been proposed that the ban on organ sales is lifted and a market-based procurement system introduced. This paper assesses four prominent proposals for how such a market could be arranged: unregulated current market, regulated current market, payment-for-consent futures market, and the family-reward futures market. These are assessed in terms of how applicable prominent concerns with organ sales are for each model. The concerns evaluated are that organ markets will crowd out altruistic donation, (...) that consent to sell organs is invalid, that sellers will be harmed, and that commodification of organs will affect human relationships in a negative way. The paper concludes that the family-reward futures market fares best in this comparison but also that it provides the weakest incentive to potential buyers. There is an inverse relationship between how applicable prominent critiques are to organ market models and the increase in available organs they can be expected to provide. (shrink)