MORAL SENSIBILITIES AND MORAL STANDING: CAPLAN ON XENOGRAFT “DONORS”

[I]nterest in animals as a source of organs and tissues for human beings remains strong. New developments in immunosuppression technology promise to lower the technical barriers to a routine use of nonhumans as organ donors, and the image of colonies of animals kept at the ready for supplying the growing human need for new organs seems a much more plausible scenario now than it did when broached by transplantation specialists in the Sixties. As Arthur Caplan has powerfully argued, the prospects that other sources of organs may resolve the supply problem are grim.... In the face of these "pro-xenograft" pressures, it becomes all the more signficant to assess arguments against the practice that rest on considerations of the moral status of the nonhumans from whom the organs are taken. To be sure, xenograft faces other moral difficulties -- for example, concerns about the quality of informed consent obtained for recipients, worries about the possibility that xenografting will serve as a vector by which new and possibly virulent viruses become established in humans, and problems about whether such spending is equitable in the light of other unresolved human needs. Yet whether we morally wrong animals in taking their organs and their lives remains a decidedly central issue here, one that cannot be finessed away by developing better informed consent procedures, better anti-viral strategies, or by situating transplantation medicine in a just health care system.