The question, what measures to address the shortage of transplantable organs are ethically permissible? requires careful attention because, apart from its impact on medical practice, the stance we espouse here reflects our interpretations of human freedom and mortality. To raise the number of available organs, on utilitarian grounds, bioethicists and medical professionals increasingly support mandatory procurement. This view is at odds with the Catechism of the Catholic Church, according to which ‘[o]rgan donation after death is a noble and meritorious act’ (...) but ethically impermissible absent consent. Those who concur with this position, but would oppose conscription on independent philosophical grounds, have not yet found a voice in the Western tradition comparable in strength to the utilitarian basis of the policy’s support, for Kantian and Aristotelian ethics, too, lend themselves to a requirement that we make our organs available to others when they can no longer serve ourselves. One finds an ethical wedge against conscription in an unexpected philosophical locale: the ‘fundamental ontology’ of Heidegger’s Being and Time, where pertinent individual choices arc protectively over what happens post mortem. Heidegger’s perspective on this issue thus meshes, not with other philosophical voices, but with Catholic doctrine—a surprising convergence of atheistic and theistic approaches to our flourishing whose ground I address in the article’s conclusion. (shrink)

Referring to Kant’s arguments addressing the moral relationship between our bodies and ourselves is quite common in contemporary debate about organ selling, although he does not provide us with any specific arguments related to this debate. It is widely argued that the most promising way to show the moral impermissibility of organ selling is to mount an argument on Kantian grounds. This paper asks whether it is possible to argue coherently against organ selling in a Kantian framework. It will be (...) shown that by mounting the argument on Kantian grounds no compelling argument can be given against sale of organs, either because the arguments apply to donation of organs, too, or the arguments are not convincing for other independent reasons. In the first section, it will be argued that donation and selling are not distinguishable in a Kantian framework, since the concern about commodification of the body and its parts shall be raised by both actions. In the second section, some contemporary accounts inspired by Kant will be presented and discussed separately. It will be argued that the reasons for promoting organ donation while arguing against selling clash with each other in an unconvincing way. -/- More Info: DOI: 10.1007/s11019-015-9623-z. (shrink)