Xenotransplantation – The Donor Welfare Perspective

Abstract

In this lecture xenotransplantation is considered from the point of view of animal ethics. The main point is to show a specific cluster of arguments commonly used in favour of xenotransplantation, simplifies the ethical questions involved. This simplification may be favourable for political reasons in a short time perspective, but may at the same time be disastrous from an ethical point of view in the long run. If the ethical questions regarding xenotransplantation are reduced to a simple yes or no, this will overshadow more important questions of how xenotransplantation may be implemented in an ethically responsible way. Resisting this simplification, we have to explore instead the necessary conditions under which xenotransplantation may be carried through or rejected. Ethics is often expected to deliver simple answers to complex questions. The bottom line of an ethical argument is expected to say yes or no. This way of understanding ethical contributions to the public and scientific discourse about xenotransplantation, or any scientific and public discourse, is however not in accordance with the ethical point of view. People who expect simple and clear-cut answers to moral questions do not or at least not always – expect these unambiguous answers because they want ethics to be of importance to the questions involved. Very often they expect unambiguous answers for the opposite reason. They want clear-cut answers just to get rid of ethical considerations. When ethics is reduced to a simple yes or no, then it is of no use and not worth taking into consideration. So ethics is from this point of view trapped in a catch 22. If it can't deliver simple answers, it is of no use, and if it delivers simple answers, it certainly is of no use. Contrary to the demand for simplicity I therefore want to say, using the words of the poet Soren Kierkegaard, that in this day and age when everybody is striving to make everything more easy, my task is to make everything more difficult, or at least as difficult as possible within twenty minutes. I am not doing this because I love difficulties, but because I think we have to consider more deeply what xenotransplantation is all about. Putting something into action, there is a world of difference between doing it with or without an extended consciousness of what we are actually doing. So let us look more closely into the matter of xenotransplantation from the perspective of animal ethics.