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The Injustice of Enforced Equal Access to Transplant Operations: Rethinking Reckless Claims of Fairness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2021

H. Tristram Engelhardt Jr.
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Extract

This essay does not directly address organ transplantation or even issues of justice, fairness, or equality in access to organs for transplantation. Instead, it engages a higher-order question: the justice of coercively and globally imposing any particular contentfull view of justice, fairness, and/or equality (i.e., a view grounded in a particular ranking of primary human goods and/or right-making conditions) under circumstances that would violate peaceable, consensual choice. It is argued that state coercion, as in the prohibition of the sale of organs or the coercive imposition of equal access to transplantations or health care, is unjust when there are insufficient grounds to establish with certainty the canonical normative character of the particular account of justice, fairness, or equality, as well as the warrant for the use of coercive force to impose such an account.

Type
Symposium
Information
Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics , Volume 35 , Issue 2 , Summer 2007 , pp. 256 - 264
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics 2007

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References

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