No, We're Not God
When the Journal of Medical Ethics released the article, “What makes killing wrong?” in January, they set off a mini-storm of outrage and controversy. The authors, from Duke University and the National Institutes of Health, asserted that ‘universally and irreversibly disabled people’ could be killed for the sake of retrieving their organs for people who are not totally disabled.
On the whole, the issue raised is when it becomes appropriate to retrieve organs from one person for the sake of another. The governing rule that a person must be dead before vital organs can be removed, known as the ‘dead donor rule,’ has many difficult aspects to it that make even its proponents uncomfortable.
But a dry journal article on the philosophical and ethical issues around such an issue would not have been interesting.
So, these authors created a provocative scenario invol…








