Organ donation: the gift, the weight and the tyranny of good acts. Society of Transplantation and the American Society of Transplant Surgeons

摘要

There is a legal maxim that bad cases make bad law. Nancy Scheper-Hughes' article (1) gives us a relentless and eclectic series of what she feels are very bad cases indeed. Not far beneath the surface of her essay is a burning anger at cases of real abuse. There is no doubt that real abuse occurs in organ donation, but small anecdotes at one end of a complex spectrum do not make cause for generalized conclusions. Her premise seems to rest that with each gift, a complex obligation is set in motion, for which we have no quarrel as this is the nature of our often complex human interactions. However, as opposed to acknowledging this complexity of human behavior, we are met with general and sweeping conclusions.