ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the idea of organs and altruism being commons-like resources, insofar as they are at once available to anyone and treated as always in short supply. An ethical sensitivity in medical or clinical practice is built by law into transplant procedures in UK regulation and in numerous global regulatory frameworks presuming medical intervention. Technical transplant terminology has long applied the idea of altruism to living donations. 'Altruistic' is an epithet for donations to a common pool, the donor thus being in no relation with any potential recipient. The gift-of-life language that saturates transplant talk summons up the very opposite of technical altruism, namely a concrete image of interpersonal relations both colouring the voluntary nature of the act implied in securing consent and personalising the outcome of the benefits. The Organ Donation Taskforce was fearful of an encroachment on altruism. Yet what people have here seems an interesting limitation to the model of an antithesis between self- and other-interest.
