The right to give

This concluding chapter provides some interpretative comment on the responses of the voluntary blood donors recorded in the preceding chapter and relates certain issues of principle and practice raised in this book's study to the potential role that governmental social policy can play in preserving and extending the freedom of the individual. Practically all the voluntary donors employed a moral vocabulary to explain their reasons for giving blood. They acknowledged that they could not and should not live entirely as they may have liked if they had paid regard solely to their own immediate gratifications. However, none of the donors' answers was purely altruistic. The chapter then argues that policy and processes should enable men to be free to choose to give to unnamed strangers. They should not be coerced or constrained by the market.