Altruism or Solidarity? The Motives for Organ Donation and Two Proposals

Abstract

Proposals for increasing organ donation are often rejected as incompatible with altruistic motivation on the part of donors. This paper questions, on conceptual grounds, whether most organ donors really are altruistic. If we distinguish between altruism and solidarity--a more restricted form of other-concern, limited to members of a particular group--then most organ donors exhibit solidarity, rather than altruism. If organ donation really must be altruistic, then we have reasons to worry about the motives of existing donors. However, I argue that altruism is not necessary, because organ donation supplies important goods, whatever the motivation, and we can reject certain dubious motivations, such as financial profit, without insisting on altruism. Once solidaristic donation is accepted, certain reforms for increasing donation rates seem permissible. This paper considers two proposals. Firstly, it has been suggested that registered donors should receive priority for transplants. While this proposal appears based on a solidaristic norm of reciprocity, it is argued that such a scheme would be undesirable, since non-donors may contribute to society in other ways. The second proposal is that donors should be able to direct their organs towards recipients that they feel solidarity with. This is often held to be inconsistent with altruistic motivation, but most donation is not entirely undirected in the first place (for instance, donor organs usually go to co-nationals). While allowing directed donation would create a number of practical problems, such as preventing discrimination, there appears to be no reason in principle to reject it.

Making the Case for Directed Organ Donation to Registered Donors in Israel

“…To this end, the legislator should opt for a legal rule that would make most people participate in the consenting pool. Identifying such a target points to the presumed consent/opt out default [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18]. Finally, caution should be employed when attempting to generalize the results of the Israeli case to other societies.…”

Impact of gender and professional education on attitudes towards financial incentives for organ donation: results of a survey among 755 students of medicine and economics in Germany

“…While they are seldom exact predictors of behavior, surveys can still provide very important insights into public common sense [9,10] and reveal public moralities towards organ donation as well as towards the incentive debate [11-13]. …”

Should Altruism, Solidarity, or Reciprocity be Used as Prosocial Appeals? Contrasting Conceptions of Members of the General Public and Medical Professionals Regarding Promoting Organ Donation

“…To elicit a discourse on the meaning of helping others (Etzioni, 2003). To discuss solidarity as it relates to kinship (Saunders, 2012).…”

“…Also, an Israeli initiative that uses prioritization as an incentive to get people to register as organ donors raises practical and moral concerns (Guttman, Ashkenazi, Gesser-Edelsburg, & Seidmann, 2011). In light of the challenge to promote OD but without resorting to the use of incentives, some advocate to replace the emphasis on appeals to the "gift of life," which presuppose "pure" altruism, with solidarity or reciprocity as alternative prosocial appeals to promote OD (Saunders, 2012;Siegal & Bonnie, 2006).…”