Professional and Public Ethics United in Condemnation of TransplantTourism

摘要

Rhodes and Schiano (2010) detach professional medicalethics from “commonmorality” in order to examine professional policies concerning transplant tourism free of “personal feelings and political agendas.” By comprehensively dissociatingmedical ethics from the larger framework of societal morality, they are left with an impoverished account of professionalism that contributes to the error of their conclusions. Their discussion suggests (i) that condemnation of transplant tourism by professional societies is inconsistent with medical ethics; (ii) that physicians ought to facilitate transplant tourism in order to improve outcomes for their own patients and transplant patients in destination countries; and (iii) that the use of organs fromexecuted prisoners poses minimal ethical concerns. In addition, they wrongly imply that the position of The Transplantation Society (TTS) is consistent with their conclusions. In this commentary, I show that these misguided conclusions are the result of a failure to comprehend the place of a rich and comprehensive professional ethics within the context of society and “common morality.” AsWelch (1993) warns, “The efforts to identify special concepts of morality for professionals create distracting distinctions that separate out pieces of the moral life that can be better understood as integral parts of a whole” (6).