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Organ Donation: Why isn’t there an App for that?
For one reason and another I have spent the weekend thinking about some of the issues involved in organ donation. I have a pretty simple position. Donating your organs is a good thing and people should do it. I’d support an opt-out system of registration as long as there was plenty of opportunity for people to express their (possibly changing) opinion on the subject. I think I would also support a system of mandated choice where the choices available include ‘I don’t know.’ In the eventuality of death this would mean ‘ask my family’ but the point is that under mandated choice (or, rather mandated registration) it should be fine for people to be undecided. Indeed I think that under any system you should be able to register a ‘no’ or a ‘don’t know,’ information that could be useful to a family when consulted about the possibility of a deceased or dying relative becoming a donor. This is not something that is currently possible and is something the Nuffield Council on Bioethics recently recommended.
On Evans' Rather Odd View of Bioethics as a Profession & Bioethicists as Professionals
I recently read John H. Evans’ new book, The History and Future of Bioethics: A Sociological View. On the face of it, this should have been very much my sort of thing. However, I am afraid to say I did not get on with it very well at all [1]. With the (very) honorable exceptions of his ideas regarding (bio)ethical translation, transmutation and, particularly commensuration, I am not sure there is much in it worth taking away. I think this is largely down to the way Evans understand bioethics as a profession and bioethicists as professionals. Of course this is, in turn, down to the fact that he is researching American bioethics. In the USA there are hospital based consultant bioethicists who, it appears, very much look and act like professionals. This gives the claim that bioethicists are professionals a stronger basis than in the UK, where there are no such ‘consultants’.
Given that bioethics is a global enterprise and the fact that there is no equivalent to the American ‘consultant bioethicists’ in the UK and elsewhere and we might question whether the fact that there are such things as hospital based ‘professional’ bioethicists should lead us to conclude that bioethicists and bioethics sui generis constitute a profession and, furthermore, if they are members of the same profession as the consulting bioethicist. For example consider the priest and the academic theologian. The priest is, certainly, a professional and a member of a profession, properly understood. However the academic theologian is not necessarily a member of that profession even if they are of the same religion. We might think the academic theologian is a professional, but this would be to distinguish her from an amateur theologian rather than to suggest that she belongs to a guild. At the very least Evans’ contention that bioethics is a profession needs further support.
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