Robert Veatch’s transplantation ethics: obtaining and allocating organs from deceased persons

This essay appreciatively and critically engages the late Robert Veatch’s extensive and important contributions to transplantation ethics, in the context of his overall ethical theory and his methods for resolving conflicts among ethical principles. It focuses mainly on ways to obtain and allocate organs from deceased persons, with particular attention to express donation, mandated choice, and presumed consent/routine salvaging in organ procurement and to conflicts between medical utility and egalitarian justice in organ allocation. It concludes by examining the unclear relations between Veatch’s ideal moral theory and his nonideal moral theory, especially in organ allocation.