ESRC SEMINAR SERIES
Transplantation and the Organ Deficit in the UK: Pragmatic Solutions to Ethical Controversy
Overview
The deficit in the available supply of organs for transplant in the UK has resulted in a lively ethical debate about how such deficit might properly be addressed. Over the past two decades, opinion has become polarised over several issues. Commodification has been one battlefield, and presumed consent another, with yet more radical voices calling for organ conscription. The organ retention ‘scandals’ re-ignited fears of doctors and scientists riding roughshod over individual rights and interests. Religious and cultural attitudes to the living and the dead body remain both influential and poorly understood. Debate ebbs and flows while the deficit in organs needed to save lives goes on. Only a very small minority in the UK are opposed to organ transplantation per se. Those who vigorously debate the proper means to increase the supply of organs are agreed on the end. They want to see more organs available for transplant.
Our proposed seminar series seeks to establish a pragmatic way forward towards increasing the supply of organs available for transplantation, while at the same time seeking to avoid the repetition of ethical controversies which are unlikely to generate workable solutions. Instead, the central aim of the series will be to explore potentially ‘new’ solutions, especially in relation to increasing the number of live donors and in assessing to what extent particular ethical and social questions have not been fully addressed in current debates. There will be five seminars in the series and they will take place over an 18 month period, running from October 2006 to March 2008. The series is particularly timely given the implementation of the Human Tissue Act 2004, and consultations which are currently taking place at EU level in relation to a proposed Directive on organ transplantation.
At the end of the series, a public lecture to present the findings from the seminar series will be given jointly by Professor Margaret Brazier and Professor John Harris from the Centre for Social Ethics and Policy (CSEP) within the School of Law. This will be in addition to the preparation of a working document setting out such findings which will be disseminated to relevant policy-makers at national and European levels, as well as a series of academic publications.