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The ethics of weighing lives
Imagine you are a doctor. You are doing organ transplants on children. Your success depends on organ donations. You have a whole hospital ward full of children waiting for organs, and you know that about half of them will die because they won’t get the organs they need in time. Then a baby is born without most of its brain. That baby (call her T) breathes and has a heartbeat, but since she does not have a brain, she will never be conscious or have any kind of human life. Indeed, you know from other such cases that the baby is likely to die within the first ten days of its life.
Of course, doing so would kill Baby T. But it would save the lives of many other children, who would have a real chance of being healed and becoming healthy and happy adults who can lead a normal, full life.
What is the right thing to do?
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Harvesting organs for transplants
Photo by Photo by Robina Weermeijer on Unsplash
Organs for transplants are a precious resource. According to the WHO, around 66,000 kidney transplants, 21,000 liver transplants and 6,000 heart transplants were performed globally in 2005. These organs have to come from somewhere. Kidneys can in principle be donated by living donors (since each of us has two of them), but livers and hearts must be obtained from donors who cannot survive the procedure. Although donors can be of any age (in the US, a 92-year old donated a liver and saved someone’s life), young and healthy people are more likely to have young and healthy organs that will be more likely to benefit organ recipients.
So where do we get the organs?
In countries that have a death penalty, organs for transplants might come from executed people, who are often young and (reasonably) healthy. A main source of organs are patients who have suffered a fatal brain damage, due to a stroke or an accident perhaps, but who have otherwise been in good health. And sometimes, like in our case, organs may come from children who are born with an incurable condition and who are expected to die soon.
The problem of killing one to save many is not limited to organ donations. This case …
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