Death-row organ donation, revisited.

Abstract

In 2011, bioethicists turned their attention to the question of whether prisoners on death row ought to be allowed to be organ donors. The discussion began with a provocative anti-procurement article by Arthur Caplan and prompted responses from an impressive lineup of commentators. In the 10 years since, the situation for death-row inmates seeking to donate has hardly changed: U.S. prison authorities consistently refuse to allow death-row procurement. We believe that it is time to revisit the issue. While Caplan's commentators rebutted his narrow contention that organ procurement would undermine the goals of deterrence and retribution, none of them attempted to make a positive, nonconsequentialist case for organ donation as a right of death-row inmates. That is the task we take up in this paper. After sketching and briefly defending a theory of punishment, we show how denial of organ donation is inconsistent with punishment's basic logic.