THE NOTION OF GIFT-GIVING AND ORGAN DONATION

The analogy between gift-giving and organ donation was first suggested at the beginning of the transplantation era, when policy makers and l egislators were promoting voluntary organ donation as the preferred pr ocurement procedure. It was believed that the practice of gift-giving had some features which were also thought to be necessary to ensure th at an organ procurement procedure would be morally acceptable, namely voluntarism and altruism. Twenty-five years later, the analogy between gift giving and organ donation is still being made in the literature and used in organ donation awareness campaigns. In this paper I want t o challenge this analogy. By examining a range of circumstances in whi ch gift-giving occurs, I argue that the significant differences betwee n the various types of gift-giving and organ donation makes any analog y between the two very general and superficial, and I suggest that a m ore appropriate analogy can be found elsewhere.